


From Bad to Worse

by Pridia



Series: Bad Days [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Complicated Relationships, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Denial of Feelings, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friendship, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Bad At Tagging, Injury Recovery, Married Couple, Memories, Memory Related, Minor Injuries, Nightmares, Out of Character Mickey, Past Relationship(s), Some Humor, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2018-08-23 19:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 29,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8340742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pridia/pseuds/Pridia
Summary: The Doctor goes to Martha after the events of Having a Bad Day, so she can help him recover. Things start to get complicated and the fact that it's going downhill with Donna while he's still recovering isn't exactly helping either.





	1. Apologies

**Author's Note:**

> I originally planned to make Having a Bad Day a one shot. That didn't happen because it was a bit too long for that.  
> Then I didn't plan on making a sequel. But yet here I am.  
> This Fic won't go in the same direction as Having a Bad Day. I technically have a new idea but it did fit perfectly with Having a Bad Day.  
> I have zero plans to put the Tenth Doctor in this and (possibly) further parts, besides mentions of him and this first chapter, which is basically a further worked out end to Having a Bad Day. The real story will start in chapter 2.  
> Edit: I went again my plans and the Tenth Doctor does feature in later chapters  
> You can read this story on [Fanfiction.net ](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12203291/1/From-Bad-to-Worse) as well.

"So everyone got changed back, thanks to Nancy and her son Jamie." Ten said.

"But not just restored, perfectly healthy, anything that was wrong with them before was gone. I remember a woman mentioning that her leg had grown back." Eleven added.

Ten burst out laughing, confusing Eleven and Martha.

"What's funny?" Martha asked him. Just as it hit Eleven.

"Oh, yeah." He smiled at the memory of the sour face of the leader Sycorax after he had grown back his hand, after said leader cut it off. It was hilarious to look back at that and he knew that was exactly what got his previous self in stitches. Somehow he stopped finding it so funny after the meta-crisis happened. It was the reason that he had lost Donna. If he had just regenerated after getting shot by that Dalek she would still know about him.

He stopped himself from sighing at the memory of that, so his past self and Martha wouldn't ask questions. Okay, his past self probably won't ask questions anyway but Martha certainly would, asking questions was one of her talents. Really, if she hadn't become a doctor, she should've become a journalist or something, she would be perfect for the job.

In fact, she had many talents. He thought that she had been one of the best companions he ever had. Clever, brave, independent. And he couldn't deny that she was good looking as well, not that it was what got his attention, it certainly was not. It was just a fact that most people would consider her good looking, including him, but that was just an unimportant fact that was lingering in the background. And he was not just telling himself that. She also had a lot more good qualities besides those three.

"What's so funny?" Martha asked again, pulling Eleven out of his thoughts. He looked at Ten who was still laughing and it didn't look like he would regain his composure again soon, so he would have to explain it to her.

He turned to Martha.

"Remembering a certain event that involved losing my hand." Martha raised an eyebrow at that, obviously noticing that both versions had two hands. "Regeneration, I'm sure Sand Shoes," Ten stopped abruptly laughing at that.

"They are still not sand shoes!" He proclaimed. Martha laughed at that.

"Yes, they are!" Eleven answered while sending a smile Martha's way.

"Coming from the man with the bow-tie." Ten shot back. Martha just sat back and enjoyed the show, they had been bickering like brothers the whole time. Chinny, as her Doctor, kept calling his future self and she had started to call him that as well, kept calling her Doctor Sand Shoes. She found that she liked both nicknames, but she would never call her Doctor Sand Shoes. But she liked Chinny calling him that and she liked calling the older Doctor Chinny.

"Bow-ties are cool." Chinny fired back, he would've tugged at it, if it hadn't been for his two injured arms. Martha shook her head, she could clearly see that they were the same person now, never mind how weird it might sound. But, _hey_ , she was travelling with an alien, what should she have expected? A giant wasp trying to kill her? Now, that would be ridiculous.

_Although...._

She thought a moment about that. After everything she had seen she wouldn't be surprised to actually come across one.

"No, they are not, converse are!" Ten claimed

"No, sand shoes are not cool," Chinny denied.

"Yes, they are." Ten wasn't planning on letting Chinny get away with that statement

"They are not." His tone not sounding too different from a toddler when they didn't get what they wanted.

"They are." Ten repeated in a similar tone as his other self.

"Not even a small bit." Martha sighed. Like mentioned before they kept bickering like brothers and she was like the mother keeping them from physically fighting, which she really had to do considering that Chinny was already injured. Thinking of that, she really had to ask him what he was going to do after they were gone. She didn't think that he would be able to look after himself with two injured arms.

"Sand shoes are not cool, bow ties are and that's final." Chinny said with a huff.

"No, it's..." Ten didn't get to finish his sentence as Martha decided that it had gone on long enough.

"Guys!" She screamed for the umpteenth time in the last 2 hours, which resulted in getting her the attention of both Doctors. "Stop being so childish!" She turned to Chinny. "You were explaining something."

"Right, yeah, like I said before until San Shoes," He looked pointedly at Ten, who was pouting at the use of his nickname but was smart enough to not say anything about it as he didn't want to anger Martha, "decided to interrupt me so rudely. My hand got cut off just after I regenerated and became that one." motioning with his head to Ten, who nodded his confirmation at the statement.

"How did it get cut off? " Martha asked.

"Sword fight." Ten answered.

"With a Sycorax," Chinny added.

"Hold on didn't you mention that with Shakespeare." Both Doctors nodded at that and answered at the same time. "I did." Causing Martha to chuckle and shake her head. They had been doing that the whole time over the course of the last two hours.

"Anyway, remember that big spaceship hovering over London about two Christmases ago?" Chinny continued.

"Why am I not surprised that you were there?" Martha asked. Causing both Doctors chuckle.

"Am I that predictable?" Chinny asked her, she shrugged at that.

"But that sword fight happened up there, I'm still wondering where my hand went, it fell off the ship." Ten said, thinking at that. Chinny made a face at that, knowing that it had gone to Jack. Ten and Martha both noticed this and asked at the same time.

"What?"

"You don't want to know." Chinny shook his head.

"I don't want to know where my hand went?" Chinny nodded, quickly trying to keep his thoughts from imagining what Jack might've done with his hand except using it to find him.

"That does mean that you'll find it, doesn't it?" Martha asked.

"Oh, yes," Chinny answered. _Although sometimes I wish I hadn't._  

"Right... I don't know whether I look forward to finding out where my hand went." Ten said.

"I would say that you don't." Eleven told him.

"Anyway, regeneration gets a lot of energy running throughout a Time Lord's body. It takes about 15 hours for the energy to fully settle down." Ten continued to explain the story.

"Yep and within those 15 hours, the energy can be used to heal any damage the Time Lord gains within that period or prevents you from actually getting damaged. It differs every regeneration, the energy usually causes some less pleasant side effects as well. Like mood swings, cravings and other things along those lines. And if you have bad luck it can actually cause you to go into a post-regeneration coma for a few hours while your body settles with the changes." Chinny explained.

"And back when I was on that ship and my hand got cut off, I was still within those 15 hours, which made me able to grow my hand back." Ten finished, wriggling the fingers of his right hand.

"Do you understand?" Chinny asked Martha.

"So basically you had a good timing at getting your hand cut off, which made you able to grow it back." Martha summarized.

"Pretty much," Chinny confirmed.

"Anyway back to the story of how Jack started travell..." Ten started but got interrupted by the TARDIS humming annoyed.

"Ah." Eleven said. "Looks like she's fed up by containing the paradox." Ten nodded in agreement.

"Yeah, we better go and leave before the TARDIS kicks us out." Ten told Martha.

"That could happen?" Martha wondered

"To Sand Shoes, yes. To you, no. Sand Shoes and me being here together requires the TARDIS to correct for the paradox. As soon as he leaves with his TARDIS, the paradox will end and like I already explained to you he won't remember." Chinny answered.

Ten sighed at that as he stood up.

"I already figured something like that. Come on Martha." He muttered.

"Wait, you just go. I have something I need to say to Martha since you won't remember this, she'll catch up with you." Chinny spoke up

"I thought you already explained it?" Ten wondered.

"Yeah, but I just realised that I've forgotten something." Ten nodded at that and left the room, going back to his TARDIS. Eleven turned to Martha.

"You'll find that hand, I mentioned. You know he won't remember it so you have to act surprised as I explain it.... A bit." He amended remembering that he never actually explained the story of his hand to her.

Martha nodded at that. "I could've figured that out myself, you know."

Eleven chuckled at that. "I know. But I figured it might go too fast for you to remember that, so I just wanted you to know it will happen. And Martha?" He looked her in the eye.

"Yeah, Doctor?" She felt slightly unnerved at the way he was looking at her.

"I'm sorry." He said seriously.

"For what?" She frowned at him.

"Everything. For everything that happened... " He stopped and considered a moment whether he wanted to continue. "For everything that's going to happen and for how I treated you."

From all of the companions he ever had, he regretted his time with Martha the most. He had barely paid attention to her. She had been and still was one of the most amazing women he had ever met. But he had only realised that after she left. She had saved his life multiple times, if it wasn't for her he would've regenerated at least 6 times during that year with her. 6 regenerations which he didn't have, he had already done the maths, this was his last body so he would've been dead if it wasn't for her. Also, he still would have been The Master's pet, if she hadn't been there.

He had never really paid attention to her when she was there, but after she had left he had found that he actually missed her. More than he missed most of his companions who had left, that was something he hadn't expected. He had even considered going back to her, apologise in the same fashion he had just done and beg her to travel with him again. What had kept him from doing that was the fact that he still had a certain reputation to keep up and that didn't involve begging people to travel with him. But he had been on the verge of doing just that when he ran into Donna again. He had still missed her after that, but it had been better when Donna was there to distract him.

After Donna left the only thing keeping him from asking Martha to go with him again was his newfound promise to never take someone with him ever again, because he didn't want to hurt them. he certainly didn't want Martha to get hurt, again.

After he regenerated and decided to take companions again he had quickly found the Ponds, he still thought of Martha every now and then, but he wouldn't ask her. One, he already had two companions so he would have no reason to ask her and two, she was married to Mickey, she had a life and he couldn't just go bargain in and steal her away from Mickey. Especially since that was exactly what he had done to Mickey with Rose. He hadn't intended to do that back then. But to do that a second time, while actually planning on it. Even he, admittingly oblivious to other's feelings, knew that was cruel.

_No!_

Asking her wouldn't be stealing her from Mickey. He would just be asking to spend some time with an old friend. Yes, that was it. Nothing more.

* * *

Martha looked at The Doctor. A bit shocked at what he just said. That the bad things weren't over yet.

_Great!_

But he was actually sorry for the way he treated her! Would that mean, that he had actually noticed her?

_Of course not!_

She mentally kicked herself. He probably wished that he had been more friendly to her. She smiled at him.

"It's okay Doctor." Martha found herself saying, she knew it was because the past him was still grieving over Rose. Of course, she didn't know how this him was feeling about that particular subject. But she suspected it was just an old pain for him now.While it was still a fresh pain with her Doctor. "I suspect you were just acting this way because you lost Rose weren't you?" She knew that it was a topic to be avoided at all cost with her Doctor, but she could try it with this version, couldn't she?

He nodded.

"It still doesn't justify the way I acted to you. But..." He took a deep breath. "I was in a dark place after I lost her, he still is." He added, meaning The Doctor who just left the room. "And I never really paid attention to you, like I did to my other companions. You deserved that attention. Deserve it." He corrected himself. "I was so busy wishing that Rose was back that I totally overlooked your amazing qualities. You're brilliant Martha Jones. Have I ever told you that? You pulled me partly out of that dark place. But I only realised that after you left. " He stopped a moment to think about that. "Actually, if I'm being honest I only fully realised it after I regenerated." He sighed and hung his head temporary and then looked back up again. "You were. Are! Blimey tenses are difficult with time travel, aren't they?" They chuckled a bit. "Anyway, you are one of the best companions I've ever had. I'm just sorry for not realising that earlier."

* * *

Martha looked at him oddly. She had never expected to hear that, she just had thought that he didn't notice her because she wasn't brilliant, barely good enough to become a companion of The Doctor. But, here he was, plainly telling her that she was one of the best companions he ever had. She was so touched by what he had said. She had been thinking that she was worthless in his eyes, but she wasn't and him telling her that made her feel a lot better. It was just what she needed to hear. She couldn't believe that he had actually said that!

"Say that again." She asked, still thinking that she just made it up.

"You are and probably will alway be one of the best companions I've ever had." He repeated himself.

"Really?" She wondered

"Is it that hard to believe?" He asked with a slightly hurt expression.

"It's just that the other you gives the impression that I'm stupid or so." She said with a shrug.

He sighed. "Martha, you are brilliant. I'm the stupid one for not realising that earlier. And I am sorry. And you really are one of the best companions I've ever had." He told her seriously.

Martha smiled at that and decided to ask the question she had wanted to ask for a while now.

"So, what are you going to do now. I mean, you can't exactly look after yourself with your arms being injured, can you?" The Doctor looked at her, of course, _she_ would think of something like that.

"Err.. That's a good point. How didn't I think of that?" He thought about it.

"Don't you have a companion anymore?"

"Dropped them off yesterday. Probably a good thing considering what just happened. They might've been injured as well. However, I probably wouldn't have destroyed the library if they would have been here."

"Can't you go back to them? I mean you can't stay on your own like this, can you?" She asked waving her arm at him to prove her point.

"I just left them, it wouldn't exactly be a good idea turning up there one day later being injured. It's probably not a good idea showing up there injured at all!" He stopped and sighed. "But then again where can I show up being injured?" He asked her. Martha gave him a look at that.

"You know what, why don't you give my future self a visit if you can. I'll know what happened and I can look after you. And I certainly won't mind." She offered.

"How can you know whether your future self would mind or not? You don't know how your life will become."

"I know myself and I don't think that there is anything more important than your well-being. Really, don't be afraid of paying a visit." She smiled at him.

"You know what. I think I just might miss Jones." He smiled back at her. "But you should go now. Sand Shoes is back in his TARDIS, that makes the paradox a bit more bearable for my TARDIS but, she's still connected to a different version of herself."

Martha nodded and leant forward to give him a kiss on the cheek, then she stood up and walked towards the door. She stopped at the door and turned back towards The Doctor.

"I'll see you, mister. And with that I actually mean you." She pointed at him with that look, so he knew that she meant business. "Whether you decide to come to me so I can look after you or just for a visit, I expect you to come over if you can."

"Yes, boss." He answered. "But, what if I don't?"

"You intend to find out?" She looked pointedly at him.

He shook his head quickly, actually quite afraid of making her angry. Making Martha Jones angry was not a good thing for the well-being of whoever had made her angry. Certainly not for Time Lords.

"Good." And with that, she walked out of the door back to her Doctor.

* * *

"Right of we go!" Her Doctor pulled a lever just after Martha entered the TARDIS and they disconnected from the other TARDIS.

Then he was feeling a bit dizzy all of a sudden. He blinked a few times to get it away "Okay, that's a bit weird. so where were we? Oh yeah, imposs... Huh?" He noticed that his stomach was sore and not because of the fact he had eaten too many cookies, which was the case as well, actually his stomach was starting to hurt quite bad. But he wasn't about to admit that because then Martha would give him a lecture about the fact that she had warned him. Which she really had. He would rather deal with it on his own. He quickly undid the buttons on his jacket and shirt and pulled up his T-shirt to reveal his stomach, where a huge bruise had appeared. One he didn't remember getting and he knew that with a bruise like that he would have noticed.

Martha winced when she saw the bruise, she didn't know how he had gotten it. But she suspected that he had gotten it during saving Chinny.

"I don't remember getting that." He said. Then he went through his memories and noticed that he didn't have any memories of the last 3 hours, he could tell because his senses told him that 2 hours and 46 minutes and 56 seconds had passed since he had fixed the solitary information department. And he didn't remember _anything_ after that. He frowned.

"Actually I don't remember anything from the last few hours. Do you remember anything after I fixed the solitary information department?" He asked her.

"No?" She answered, hoping he couldn't tell that he was lying, so she wouldn't have to explain it without actually explaining it.

Unfortunately for Martha, The Doctor could tell and raised his eyebrow.

"You do know what happened, don't you?" He stated. Martha sighed.

"You told me not to tell you after you forgot it."

"Why did I forget it in the first place?" Martha shrugged.

"If I would answer that question, I would have to say what happened."

"Do you know how I got that bruise?" She shook her head.

"Didn't see it happen. I do however have a suspicion as of what happened."

"What's that?" He asked her. He really regretted eating all those cookies earlier, his stomach was starting to hurt now. He was very good at getting his stomach to hurt because he ate too much in this body. He usually hid it. It worked with Rose, she had never caught him. Martha ,however, was much better at noticing details, as he had learned. She really was just brilliant. She had caught him trying to hide his pain and/or discomfort for quite a few times now, actually every time he tried to hide it from her. That didn't stop him from trying to hide it, though. Of course, she would try and make him feel better once she knew, or just be there for him when the pain got almost unbearable, which, he had to admit, happened about every time he got his stomach to hurt. That really ought to have taught him not to eat too much, but somehow it hadn't. And he was paying the price for that every time he ate too much. Time Lords were just not built for eating a lot.

Also, hadn't she just warned him about not looking after him if his stomach started hurting after eating too many cookies?

* * *

 Martha looked at The Doctor, about to say that she couldn't tell him her suspicions without telling him what he wasn't allowed to know when she noticed that he was behaving a bit odd. She had seen him act like that a few times before. The difference was delicate but somehow she managed to notice it. She had found that he would act like this when his stomach was hurting from eating too much. and suspected that this was the case again. Considering how many cookies he had eaten before the crisis and then the Jelly Babies afterwards. 

She didn't know why he kept hiding it, while she had helped him through them before. She suspected that there was an alien explanation for that.

Although, when she thought of it, men _were_ known to hide their pain.

"What's wrong?" She decided to ask, to see whether he would admit it.

"Nothing." He answered a bit too quickly.

"Want to try that again?" She said firmly.

He turned to Martha and looked sheepishly at her.

"My stomach hurts." He lowered his gaze to study his trainers, waiting for the expected lecture about his eating habits.

Martha sighed. "It's a nice bruise." She knew that wasn't what was causing him to be in pain, but figured that she could tease him a bit since it was his own fault.

"No, it's not the bruise. Although it hurts as well. It's ehhmm the cookies." he admitted.

 _And the Jelly Babies_ Martha mentally added although he didn't remember eating them.

"You didn't listen to me again and ate too much?" He nodded.

"Doctor, why do you keep trying to hide that you're in pain? I can help you. You know that."

He looked at her and opened his mouth to answer when the pain suddenly became worse. He groaned and sat down on the jump seat holding his stomach.

Martha was next to him in an instant. She had never intended to follow up on her threat about not helping him. He needed her when he was like this. She was a bit disappointed that she wouldn't get the desired answer, but his health was more important now. She would, however, get him to speak when he was feeling better. She took his arm.

"Come on let's get you to bed. And we are going to look for a way to prevent this from happening in the future, mister. Something we should've done way earlier!" She pulled him up and helped him to his room. She already knew that it was going to be a long night since he tended to be awake and crying out from the pain when he was like this. But she was going to work on a diet for him to keep him from getting these pains in the future.

If it meant that she would have to deal with the Oncoming Sulk because he wasn't allowed to eat his favourite foods, so be it.


	2. Burn With Me

The Doctor sighed as he heard Sand Shoes' TARDIS disconnect from his TARDIS. He hadn't expected the day to go like this and he certainly hadn't expected to injure both arms. He knew that Martha had been right, he certainly wouldn't be able to look after himself with two injured arms, but he wasn't ready to admit that to himself yet. He yawned, it had been an extremely long and challenging day. He was exhausted. He turned on the infirmary bed to make himself more comfortable and was soon fast asleep.

* * *

"I'm scared. I'm so scared" He wanted to cry, he was laying in the status chamber to be frozen to get the entity of that sun, that was trying to possess him, out of his body. He didn't want it to use him to hurt people, that was the last thing he wanted to happen.

"Just... stay calm. You saved me, now I return the favour. Just... just believe in me."

Oh, he believed in her, but he was afraid that there was nothing she could do to save him. But she certainly would find a way to save the others on the ship, but then what? She would be stuck in the 42nd century because he wouldn't exactly be able to bring her home when he was dead.

"It's bloody killing me! Then what will happen?!"

"That's enough I've got you!" Martha tried to soothe him, unsuccessfully. 

"There's this process. This... this thing... that happens... if I'm about to die."

He figured that he would have to explain regeneration to her now that he was about to die.

"Shhh... quiet now. Cause that is not gonna happen." She was still trying to sooth him.

"But what if it is?!"

"We'll figure it out. Are you ready?"

"No!" He admitted.

The stasis chamber got activated.

_Oh gosh, that hurts._

He screamed this shouldn't hurt that much.

 _Of course_ , he realised, the entity made his body temperature higher. Which made him less tolerant to lower temperatures. And he was going to be frozen on the lowest temperature a healthy Time Lord could take.

"MARTHA STOP! It makes me unable to take a temperature this low." He could feel the regeneration energy starting to run through his veins.

The status chamber stopped.

"What happened?"

"It raised my body temperature. AAAHH." It was really hurting, he realised that the entity wouldn't be able to control his body like it had done the humans. Him being a Time Lord made that impossible, but now it was trying to kill him and successfully as well.

"Power's been cut down in engineering." He heard Captain McDonnell say.

"But who's down there?" Martha asked her.

"Leave it to me."

He had no idea what they were talking about and didn't try to find it out either as he could feel his body shutting down and the regeneration energy running through his veins even harder than it had less than a minute ago.

"Martha, ARRRGGHG. That process..." He gasped.

"That you just mentioned when you're about to die?" She asked surprisingly calm considering the circumstances, but then again she was a medical student. Weren't they supposed to stay calm in a situation like this?

"Yeah," He growled out from the pain. "I can … it's starting."

"You're glowing, is that good or bad?"

"That's the process... There's something …. need know... about..." He wasn't able to focus on forming full sentences anymore.

"And that is?" she prompted.

"It … changes … me …. way ….. look. AARRGGGG" He screamed from the pain.

"How do you mean, like completely different as in unrecognisable?" Oh, she was fast.

"Yeah... there's more..." He growled one more time, trying to fight the regeneration energy long enough to explain it, but he could tell that he couldn't hold it back much longer. "No...Time... Arrgh... help... stand... better …. standing..."

"This process works better when you're standing?" She asked. He felt a pair of hands grab him to help him stand up.

"Yeah... stay away... dang.." He couldn't finish the sentence as he was suddenly bursting with regeneration energy.

A few moments later he gasped. He never could remember the regeneration itself because it also affected his brain cells, but he could already feel how different this body was.

"Legs, I still got legs, Good." He kissed his knee. "Arms, Hands. Ooh... Fing..."

He didn't get to finish checking out his new body as the computer decided to interrupt him.

"Impact in 4.47."

He looked at Martha who looked very stunned, which he couldn't blame her for. Rose had been very stunned when he had regenerated as well.

"Right, yeah... we're on a ship that's going to crash in less than 5 minutes if we don't do anything about that anytime soon. So how about we do something about that and then I'll explain what just happened." He was hoping that Martha would accept that for now.

"Yeah, I agree with that plan. But I want those answers." Martha eyed him oddly.

"Yes, boss." That was what he was hoping for. "Come on." He ran off not even checking whether she was following him.

"Impact in 4.08" The computer announced.

"We need to get to the front! There are Sun particles in the fuel, we need to get rid of them. We need to give back what they took, then they will leave us alone." He told Martha as they were running to the front of the ship as fast as possible.

"Impact in 3.43." The computer announced as they passed area 21.

All of a sudden the comm got activated and he heard Captain McDonnell.

"Riley, Scannell. I'm sorry." He knew that tone, he knew that she was about to sacrifice herself. That was not what he wanted even after what she had done to that sun but he knew that there was no time to stop her.

"Exterior airlock opened." The computer announced, telling him that he had been right in his suspicion.

"Oh, Captain... we've got to keep going, Martha." They entered area 8.

"Impact in 2.17." The Computer announced.

All of a sudden the Doctor groaned in pain, which was caused by the regeneration, he leant against the wall for support as he took a few deep breaths.

"You okay?" He felt sad that Martha didn't call him Doctor.

He coughed up a bit regeneration energy and pushed himself up again.

"Yeah, just a normal side-effect of regeneration. Come on, we don't have much time left." He started running again.

"Survival element protection. Zero percent." The computer warned them.

"Really? I was so counting on the ship to protect us as we are crashing into a star." The Doctor remarked sarcastically. "Looks like I can scrap that part of the plan."

"Impact in 1.21" The Computer announced.

"Yes, we're running out of time, I got the memo." They were almost there.

"Impact in 1.06."

"How exactly do these intervals work? It's not exactly a warning every 10 seconds or so." The Doctor remarked, genuinely confused.

"Yeah, I don't think that we have time to think about that now!" Martha remarked.

"Fair enough." He conceded as they rounded the bend into area 1.

"Vent the engines. Dump the fuel." He told Riley and Scannell, who were already there, they looked at him questioning. "There are sun particles in the fuel. Get rid of them."

"And who are you?"

"Just do it!" Martha told them, at least _she_ trusted his plans.

The boys sprang into action. Doing as they were told. The Doctor groaned in pain once more and sat down on the floor.

"You okay?" Martha asked him once more

"I will be." he groaned once more. "It's just not advised to go running around right after regeneration. That is how the process is called." He told her as he realised that he hadn't told her that.

At that moment one of the boys twisted the 'fuel dispersal' dial, which caused the ship to lurch and caused all of them flung about.

"Fuel dump is programmed." The Computer announced.

"There how're we gonna fly?!"

The countdown hit zero just as the computer gave one more message.

"Impact averted. Impact averted."

All of them were lying on the floor. The Doctor felt exhausted, being possessed by a star, then a regeneration and then running for you life was not something that you could easily shake off. He was still lying on his back as the other had pulled themselves up again and partying that they were still alive. Well, a lot of people had died, including him technically, he had only had that body for a bit longer than a year. That made him a bit sad. If he kept going like this he would run out of regenerations before he could say Raxacoricofalapatorius.

That was when Scannell turned to him.

"Now who the hell are you."

"I'm The Doctor." He answered as he finally pushed himself to a sitting position.

"No, you're not." Riley said.

"It's a bit complicated. But I am The Doctor. I am an alien who can change his appearance. Martha knows that I am an alien." He looked at Martha who was looking at him scared and clearly torn as of whether she would trust him. "Please, Martha." She shook her head at him.

"Martha, please." He pleaded a bit more, she shook her head at him.

He felt tears burn behind his eyes. Somehow it hurt him more that Martha denied him than when Rose had done the same. He didn't know why.

"Martha." She turned away from him. Now he actually felt his hearts break and he still didn't know why. He didn't care about Martha that much, did he?

"I told you just before it happened that I would change my appearance. Please, I'm still The Doctor, the alien with two hearts." Martha turned towards him again. "Do I have to re-earn that title?" He asked referring to what she had told him in the hospital.

She turned and walked away from him.

"No, please …. Martha, please... Come BACK!" He screamed, his hearts breaking, he didn't follow her as he knew that he should give her some time and he didn't think that he would have the energy to follow her anyway, no matter how determined he was.

He sat back against the wall and put his palms against his eyes, that's when he noticed the wet trail on his cheek. He was crying and he hadn't even noticed.

He felt horrible, he was tired, hungry and heartbroken. He could say that he had expected the first three. But the last one? Nope, he had not seen that coming. You need to be in love to get your heart broken. He wasn't in love with Martha, was he? He went through his memories as Ten and realised that he had been ignoring his feelings in favour of griefing Rose. He groaned.

_Guess who got the idiot of the year award?_

"You really are him, aren't you?" He heard Riley say.

Right, he wasn't alone, he hadn't forgotten that, not at all! He removed the palms from his eyes and looked at Riley.

"And why would you believe it now?"

Riley sat down next to him and offered him a tissue, which he accepted gratefully.

"Thanks."

"Because, I know I haven't really seen the other you long, but I could see that you cared about her. Your reaction shows that you still care about her."

The Doctor broke completely down at this and ended up crying on Riley's shoulder.

"Doctor." He heard someone say, a very familiar voice.

"Doctor wake up." Was that Martha? No can't be, she had just rejected him.

He felt someone grabbing and shaking him.

"Leave me alone." He groaned as the world turned dark.

"Nope, wake up." The person, Martha? Was still shaking him.

He finally opened his eyes. And indeed Martha was standing in front of him.

"Martha?" He felt the tears running over his cheeks and realised that his arms were injured and that it had been a nightmare, _thank god_. He hadn't regenerated on the SS Pentallian and Martha certainly hadn't rejected him because he regenerated, she was just standing here worried about him.

He clung to her despite his injured arms and broke down. It had felt real, _too real,_ although he knew that Martha would never turn on him if he regenerated he still needed that confirmed and that would be if she accepted this him, which she was already doing.

"Bad dream?" He nodded at that, she ran her hands through his hair in an attempt to comfort him, something that had always worked on the previous him, so it was worth a shot. "Shhh... It's over now, that's what it was. Just a bad dream."

"I know." He said barely harder than a whisper.

The sat in silence for a few minutes and The Doctor was calming down as he realised that Martha wasn't going to abandon him anytime soon.

"How...? What ..? What are you doing here?" He finally asked her.

"The TARDIS materialised in my flat, don't know how considering that you were here having a nightmare."

"She must've flown herself. She does that sometimes. So, how did you get in?"

"You never asked your key back." she answered.

He nodded. "Right, never had a reason to do that."

They sat in silence for another while. When Martha broke the silence.

"Your arms?"

"I thought that you remembered that."

"Of course I do, but I figured that I shouldn't mention it until you confirmed that you did remember it." He chuckled.

"Still making sense after... how long has it been?"

Martha chuckled at that.

"About a year and a half. How long has it been for you?" She asked.

"From where are we counting?"

"the Sontaran."

"Hmm, 2 or 3 years? I think."

"How long since you regenerated?"

He was silent for a moment.

"The same." He whispered.

"You regenerated just after the Sontaran." She realised.

He nodded.

"I was already dying." He sighed. "I wanted to see everyone one more time in that body, saving you from a Sontaran was an added bonus." He smiled at her.

"How long has it been since your arms?"

"Less than a day. I'm not sure, I fell asleep just after past you left." He yawned. "I am still tired, while you hold me?" He looked at her, she had held him when they were stuck in 1969 every time he had woken up after a nightmare, so he could fall asleep again. He never had a nightmare when he had been in her arms. Of course, he had held her the same way when she had had a nightmare, which had happened a lot more than he would've liked, considering that most of them were about something that had happened while she had been with him.

She nodded and climbed on the bed, which the TARDIS had helpfully made a bit bigger so they could get into a more comfortable position, and gather him in her arms.

"What about Mickey?" He asked her as they were settled.

"He's with Jack in Germany, there were these aliens that needed to be sorted out. I don't know when they come back."

He nodded and made himself more comfortable in her arms as he felt himself slowly dosing off, this time into more pleasant dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, still not a lot of plot, but there is some plot if you know where to look for it. I don't know when Donna will actually get into the picture, I suspect 2 or 3 more chapters, but knowing myself I am mostly wrong with these guesses so don't blame me if it turns out differently.  
> I came up with the idea of Martha rejecting the Doctor after regeneration but had trouble following it, as it is so out of character. So this is an out of character move but I thought it to be fine as it is a nightmare. It still hurt to write it, I want Martha to accept the Doctor and just hug him and help him through the regeneration sickness. And I already planned that in my head but had to write this where Martha just walked away. I am however planning on writing this in a different story as an AU where Martha does accept him or at least gives him a chance. But that's a whole different topic. I hope you enjoyed this Chapter.


	3. Realisations

The Doctor woke well rested from a very pleasant dream he already couldn't remember, then he remembered that he was laying in Martha's arms, he turned towards her and saw that she had fallen asleep herself. Not that he was surprised by this, this had almost always been the case when he woke up in her arms. He sighed contently, he would never admit it, but he really missed this. Why hadn't they done this more often? Well, he never realised that he missed this, until now.

He laid his head back on her chest and listened to her heartbeat for a while, his thoughts trailed back to the nightmare he had before Martha woke him. He had often nightmares about the SS Petallian, but never that he regenerated and then Martha leaving him. Why had the idea hurt so much, a better question was, how could he have realised in his dream that he loved her if that wasn't true at all in real life? They were nothing more than friends, just friends.

_Right?_

Of course, not. It was just his brain playing a trick on him, Martha was beautiful, there was no denying of that it was a fact, everyone in the universe  with a sense of beauty would agree with him. But that he thought of her as attractive didn't mean that he loved her, right? No, there was also the fact that she was clever but also compassionate and stubborn as hell. She was a great doctor and always looked after everyone who needed her help and he loved her for that

The Doctor blinked.

Where had that come from? It was just one of her traits that he appreciated a lot, he'd love everyone for having these traits. Okay, Martha was special but,... oh no... oh no... nope, impossible... nope... not happening, not happening at all he wasn't falling in love with Martha Jones, that just wasn't happening. The Doctor started to shook his head but stopped short as he remembered the sleeping beaut _...Human!,_ who he was using as a pillow. Better not! Waking Martha Jones was a death sentence, or at least asking for trouble. He had learned that a Martha with disrupted sleep tended to become very moody. She wasn't perfect and that was one of the things that he lov- _liked!_ about her.

No, he didn't love her, definitely not, nope, not at all, not a bit, well, he certainly didn't hate her, but love her? No, he would've realised something like that earlier, right? he had known her for seven years. Blimey! Seven years already? He wasn't that oblivious to his own feelings, right? He was admittedly oblivious to other's feelings, but his own? No, that had to be impossible, he knew himself, had had almost a 1000 years to figure his feelings out. This kind of feelings carried over during regeneration as they were too important to change on a whim. So he knew his feelings. But on the other hand he had never fallen in love before, so he didn't know how it felt. No... no … no, he was not thinking like that! He certainly was not.

He did _not_ love Martha Jones!

Besides, she was married. It would be a bit late to declare his love to her, as she was married. And he was not going to steal Martha from Mickey, he had already done that to Mickey once.

And, why, oh why, was he thinking like this if he didn't love Martha. Well, he was just considering what would happen if he did love her, but he didn't he certainly did _not._

Why couldn't he just get the thought of his mind, he did _not_ love her, so he didn't need to think about it either. He went to search his memories, he had never felt anything remotely non-platonic for her. So why would he _now_? It couldn't be the regeneration because as mentioned before feelings like that carried over. Maybe was he just looking at his feelings in another way? No, then he still would've noticed that he had some feelings for her in the first place. Maybe it was just the joy of seeing her for the first time in years, no that couldn't be it either, he hadn't felt this way when he met Sarah Jane again and that had been more than 50 years! So what was it then, why would he realise in his dream that he love her if it wasn't remotely true in real life?

Martha stirred, pulling him out of his thoughts. He looked up as she opened her eyes.

"Morning." He smiled at her.

"Morning." She smiled back.

That's when it clicked in The Doctor's mind, why he had realised in his dream that he loved her.

He actually loved Martha Jones.

That was when a headache set in and everything went blurry for a moment, memories he didn't know that he had came flooding in. There were so many memories, he couldn't process them, he would need a few hours to sort them. A quick glance at some of them told them that they were from his time with Martha and that they were of the less platonic kind. There was one memory that was obviously the most important one, he looked at it, it was from their time in 1969, it was when he was fighting some sort infection and Martha had been looking after him, he had been in bed for the whole week, unconscious most of the time. The Doctor wondered why that memory would be so important to him, it was normal, he had been sick several times back in 1969 and a bit before that as well, his body had been weakened by the Chameleon Arch causing him to be more vulnerable to infections and such. So this day was one of the days where he was sick, nothing special, right? But then he heard his thoughts on that day and realised why the memory was so important. That day was special.

It was the day that he realised that he had fallen in love with Martha Jones.

"Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!" He blinked a few times and present-day Martha Jones came into focus again, he shook his head to get it clear again, trying to sort out his head and instantly regretted it as his headache got worse. Then he realised that Martha sounded worried.

"Yeah?" He focused on her, yep, she indeed looked worried.

"What happened?" She asked.

"What do you mean?" He asked.

"I don't know, you just went all..., all of a sudden you just... like you …. I don't know... like your mind wasn't here anymore. I think." She answered. "Something we should worry about?"

"OHHH!" He realised exactly what had happened, well he had had a suspicion already, but what Martha explained was actually a side effect of it.

He had just unlocked a memory lock. Why would he have a memory lock?

He looked wide-eyed at Martha and turned to lay on his back as the current position was getting a bit uncomfortable with his injured arms. He took a deep breath.

"Okay, was not expecting that." He said eventually. Still trying to figure out where that memory lock came from, more importantly, why had it hidden his feelings for Martha Jones?

"Doctor! What's wrong?" Martha pulled him out of his thoughts once again and he quickly pushed the information of the memory lock in a corner of his mind, so he could sort it out later.

"Well, either nothing or a lot." He answered. "Depends on your point of view, but let's just go with nothing. I'm fine perfectly fine, although," He held up his arms and looked at them pointedly. "perfectly fine?"

"How can there nothing be wrong but a lot be wrong at the same time?" She asked him, this caused The Doctor to look at her wide-eyed once again.

"Did I say that out loud?" She nodded. "Ah, didn't mean to do that. Hmm, don't worry about it, it's just......" _That I just realised that I've been in love with you for years._

_......_

_Yes, that would be a good idea to say to a married woman who had gotten over her crush on you years ago_. He sighed "I'm not going to explain that."

"And why not? What just happened? Is something wrong with you?"

"Martha, I already said that I'm fine, I mean it. I know what happened, not why it happened or why now. Although I might have an idea on why it happened now, as of the why, well... I think I need to go through my mind for that piece of information. But it can't be too bad, really fine, just something got triggered inside my mind, something I put there myself..." He paused in thinking.

"How can you know that?"

"Because I recognise my own doing, it's a bit like handwriting, you always recognise your own handwriting, don't you?"

"I suppose, but what happened?"

"Not going to say that."

"Is it something embarrassing?"

"Could be," He looked Martha in the eyes, "I'm not going to say it. Not this time, definitely not and certainly not before I have taken the time to figure out what exactly happened. At this point, I only know the outlines of it. But I don't think that I will say it after I fully figured it out."

"What can be so secret, that you won't tell?"

"Can't say that without giving it away, can I?" He blinked a moment. "You said something very similar after I lost that memory."

"I had to." She told him.

"I know." He smiled.

"Do you remember how you got that bruise?"

He groaned.

"I take that as a yes."

"That hurt." He said whiningly.

"It looked like it, the bruise." She clarified. "I'm sure you felt that, along with those cookies and Jelly Babies."

"Jelly Babies, of course, that was why it hurt so bad that particular time." he sighed. "Did I ever thank you for helping me out with that?"

"No, you were earlier sulking because I forbade you to go around snacking," she answered making him chuckle.

"Yeah, I stopped with the sulking. Realised that not having a stomach ache every other week was way better than keeping those eating habits. Didn't stop me from missing them, though, my eating habits not the stomach aches. Still miss them, well, not exactly, new taste-buds. Never stopped loving Jelly Babies or Bananas but I suppose same rules go for this body. They actually don't, I think. My previous body was the only one who got those stomach aches, never had them before. So might not have them now. On the other hand, my eating habits did get out of hand back in that body. To be honest, more things went out of hand when I was still him." he sighed. "A lot. It's probably a good thing that I regenerated when I did."

"What happened?"

He sighed. "I did some very stupid things." He shook his head. "Went crazy a bit, okay, not a bit, went fully crazy. I tried, I tried … I tried to change a fixed point." Martha gasped. "I explained why you shouldn't, didn't I?." She nodded. "Would you believe me if I said that it backfired?"

"Yeah." She decided then to change the topic again. "But, how exactly did you get the bruise?

"Right, do you remember the Jelly Babied gravity stabilisers?" He asked her.

"Of course, I do."

"That's basically what happened."

She looked pointedly at him.

"Okay, ehhh, do you remember the first flip? You witnessed that."

"Yeah, you were clinging to this railing."

"Yes, so, I fell on that railing with my stomach, quite hard." He said.

"How did you fall?"

"Horrible timing, I was about to raise myself up to that railing, so I could reach the console. When the TARDIS decided to flip back. That combination caught me by surprise and gravity did the rest."

"Right, makes sense." She climbed out of the bed and asked him, "Do you want to get out of bed as well?"

He nodded, starting to try and get himself up without landing on his hands, it was a bit hard as he still had a bit of a headache from unlocking a memory lock. He sighed and looked up sheepishly at Martha, who smiled back in sympathy and started helping him to get up.

"Do you want some breakfast?" She asked him.

"Yes please." He answered as she led him out of the infirmary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh oh oh, The Doctor can be thick, can't he? I'm sorry for the people who don't ship The Doctor and Martha and/ or actually hate her (although I can't quite grasp why you would ship them if you hate Martha *frowns in thinking*), which I gathered is a shockingly huge group, for not giving any warning on the subject as I wanted it to be a bit of a surprise. The Doctor realised his feeling for Martha ages ago, but didn't at the same time? What's going on! Well I know what's going on, you lot don't, nor does The Doctor. You'll find out and he'll find out before Donna will be introduced, which certainly won't happen next chapter so I'm going to update my suspicion to 2 or 3 chapters again, why I keep bothering with these inaccurate guesses? No one knows!. Anyway, we'll see how this goes, The Doctor is in love with Martha while Martha is married to Mickey, how will that go? Does Martha still love him, even though she accepted that it will never happen? However, I will tell you that The Doctor WON'T make a move on Martha and risking her marriage, which I do believe is hinted a few times in this chapter. He doesn't want to do that to Mickey again, so the question is: how will it go?. Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this chapter.


	4. An Old Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had an awful lot of trouble with this chapter, which is why it took so long to write and I'm still not completely happy with the outcome but I think that it's good enough.

* * *

"Blimey Doctor, this place looks deserted. How long have these eggs been boiled!?, they're certainly not edible anymore" Martha asked The Doctor.

"Ehhmm..." He thought about it for a moment and then answered timidly. "I'd say three weeks?"

"THREE WEEKS! Why would you boil so many if you don't eat them, everyone knows that unboiled eggs are longer preservable."

"I ehmm only noticed that they were boiled yesterday and haven't gotten around cleaning it up yet." He said with a shrug.

"How can you boil eggs without noticing?"

"The Timey-Wimey Detector?" He answered timidly again.

"Why would you take that into the kitchen?" She asked.

"I didn't, I was relocating it, among other stuff and I must've walked past the kitchen a bit too closely." He shrugged.

She shook her head and threw away the eggs.

"We've got stale toast." She told him, "And that's it, have you ever even heard of shopping!?"

"I was planning on doing some shopping yesterday. But that plan fell a tiny bit into the water." He admitted. "Or in the gravity stabilisers, depends on what you like."

"That has been going on the whole day?" Obviously, she was not letting it go so easily.

"The better part of the afternoon." He admitted.

"And what have you been doing in the morning, besides, I hope, eating breakfast?" Martha asked him.

"The dishes?" He answered timidly once again, he didn't know why but Martha was in a bad mood and he knew that he had to be careful, as he had learned ages ago that an angry Martha Jones wasn't good for the health.

"Then why are there still a lot of unwashed plates standing on the counter? And what happened to that automated dishwasher you used to have?"

He looked at his feet and took a deep breath, memories of Donna flooding him for the second time in two days.

"I got interrupted while doing the dishes." He said in a very low voice, so low that Martha had trouble understanding it, and had she just heard tears in his voice?

"How do you mean interrupted?" She decided to just leave it, that and the fact that he hadn't told her what happened to the automated dishwasher.

"Ehmm," He looked at her again, "eeeehm, I might've gotten interrupted?" He blushed.

"You already said that, with what?" She tried again, gathering from his reaction that he was embarrassed about it, this made her only the more curious as to what happened.

"It's not important." He tried, his face was really red, she could hear that the TARDIS was snickering, definitely embarrassing she concluded.

"The TARDIS apparently doesn't seem to think so." She said referring to the snickering.

"Ehhm." He looked down again. "Ibrokeaplateandhurtmyselfdoingthat!" He said so fast that she couldn't understand it and that said something as she was used to his previous self talking like ten-thousand words an hour.

"What was that?" She asked him.

He looked at her shyly.

"Go on, Doctor." She crossed her arms waiting for it, he took a deep breath and repeated slowly.

"I broke a plate and hurt myself doing that." He looked down in embarrassment, waiting for her to burst out laughing, but that didn't happen, she just frowned.

"How?"

He shrugged.

"I've been trying to figure that out for years. " She raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, I actually gave up." He admitted.

"Really Doctor, I've said it before, I'm pretty sure of it, but I can't seem to grasp how you keep beating the strong and bad aliens without acquiring a single scratch, while you can't manage to do the most simple things without getting hurt."

"Yeah, you've said that before, I'm also pretty sure that I answered that I have been wondering that myself for many years."

"Yeah, I think you did." She smiled at him and he automatically smiled back.

_Oooh that smile._

He loved that smile, but at this moment he cursed it, ever since his revelation earlier today his head was spinning and that smile somehow made it even worse, he really needed time to sort himself out and figure what was going on with that memory lock, but he knew that he needed to do that alone, without having Martha in the room, or anyone else for that matter, but certainly not her. And he knew that with his injured arms he would have trouble finding some alone time. Back in 1968 and partly 1969 he had had more than enough alone time as she went to work almost every day, and when she was free he still had his daily shower, something he knew he wouldn't have now as he would need help in the bathroom with his arms injured and had the rising suspicion that it would be Martha who would help him. Not that he normally would've minded, he had never had a problem with nudity and Martha had actually helped him before on the subject when he was partly paralysed after getting bitten by a certain insect, of course, he has regenerated since that, not that he cared.

He did however have a problem with it now, as he really wanted some privacy to sort himself out and had a feeling this might be a bit problematic because of his arms, which would cause him to need help with pretty much everything and his head was spinning with all the unsorted information even though he had stored it away in his mind, it was too much information to simply store away. He really needed a few hours alone to sort through it. How was he going to get that?

"Doctor!" Martha's voice cut in through his thoughts and it sounded like that wasn't her first attempt to get through to him.

He blinked a few times, pushing away his previous thoughts.

"Yeah?" He answered.

"What's going on with you?" She asked him.

"How do you mean?" He asked although he suspected what she meant.

"You keep zoning out, it's the second time today!" She answered.

"Only the second time." He answers teasingly, but she raised an eyebrow making it clear that she wants him to be serious about it. "Really, don't worry about it, I'll be fine."

"You sure?"

"Yeah." He told firmly. "I am sure." He just needed to sort out through these memories and he'd be fine, not counting his injured arms.

"Okay..." she accepted it sceptically. "I was asking you whether we should just go to my kitchen and eat there as this place is empty?"

"Sure." he answered and Martha led him out of the TARDIS towards her kitchen.

* * *

Martha was feeding The Doctor his toast throughout eating her own toast as he couldn't eat with his injured hands, while they were catching up which each other a bit.

Then The Doctor noticed something.

"You still got that bracelet then." He remarked.

She looked at her wrist and looked at the silver bracelet with twisted parts he had gotten her for Christmas 1968 and nodded.

"Yeah, it's a nice reminder of my time with you." She told him.

"But..." He began.

" _Don't!_ Don't you dare go there! I've told you before I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Never mind the bad times."

He sighed. "I suppose, doesn't change the fact that I wish it had been a bit more fun instead of ..." He trailed off.

"I know, but that wasn't your fault. None of that was your fault." She smiled at him.

He managed a small smile back, having his head spin a bit worse again.

Then the phone rang, startling both of them.

"Okay, that sounds like a phone." The Doctor concluded.

"Yeah, 10 out of 10 on observation," Martha answered sarcastically as she got up to get her mobile from the counter.

"Who's calling?" He asked.

Martha grabbed her phone and looked at the caller ID.

"Jack. You. Shush." She told The Doctor.

"Why?" He questioned her.

"Because ….. Just shush." She gave him a look that told him that he really should obey so he nodded.

"Hello, Jack," Martha answered the phone casually.

"Hello Nightingale, any chance that you can help me with something?" The Doctor could hear Jack's voice through the phone without effort because of his advanced senses, even though his head was spinning with the unsorted after-effects of opening the memory lock. Martha glanced at him, knowing perfectly fine that he could hear Jack.

"Which is?"

"The thing is we found this alien but we're not entirely sure what to do with ehmm him? Would you like to give your opinion?"

"Ehmmm..." Martha looked at The Doctor and rose a questioning eyebrow, clearly asking him whether he wanted to get involved.

He nodded.

"Well, actually I've actually got a visitor who probably won't mind voicing his opinion." She told Jack, The Doctor beamed at her.

"Who?" The Doctor heard Jack ask.

"Just an old friend of us." She told Jack smudgy, smiling at The Doctor who was smiling back.

"An old friend?" Jack repeated questioningly. "Which old friend?"

"How many old friends do we share exactly Jack? Can't you guess?" she asked him teasingly.

"Did our Doctor show up?" Jack asked.

"Yup, albeit a bit different..." she pointed at his arms clearly asking him whether she should tell Jack he was injured. He shrugged, making it clear that he didn't mind her telling Jack.

"And a bit injured." She added.

"Did he trip on a piece of clothing and fell down the stairs of the wardrobe again?" Jack asked, laughing at the memory. It had happened in the first week after he had joined team TARDIS, The Doctor hadn't ended up too injured, only sprained his ankle and had a cut on his head, Jack had seen it happen and had thought it hilarious.

The Doctor, on the other hand, started blushing at that.

"Jack!" He screamed loud enough for the man to hear it through the phone, then he continued in a mumble barely audible to Martha let alone Jack. "You promised not to tell anyone."

Martha burst out in laughter when she visualised that, it was certainly something she could see happening to him.

"Martha!" The Doctor whined, his face could have auditioned for the role model of the perfect colour a tomato.

 _Well, that hasn't changed then._ Martha thought when she saw his face, remembering all the times he had blushed in the past.

"Or did he got electrocuted again while working on the console?" Jack kept guessing, obviously teasing the Time Lord. Martha burst out into laughter again.

The Doctor might've laughed as well if it hadn't been for the amazing headache he was getting from all those sounds. His already spinning head was allocating most of his processing power to containing the memories of the memory lock, which resulted in him being less capable of suppressing other things, causing him to hear the sounds of Martha and Jack rather loudly and because of that his concentration on other things was slipping.

"Doctor?" Martha had noticed the Time Lord's distress.

The offending sounds were gone now, but his head was still hurting and the remaining processing power that wasn't working on containing the memories of the memory lock was trying to assess the damage the sounds had done, the exact thing he didn't need as he had needed all of his remaining concentration to keep him functioning.

He was barely aware of Martha lunging out forward to catch him as he got pulled into the darkness.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we are then, poor Doctor. He's suffering so much from that memory lock :(. And he still doesn't know what happened, nor do you. I'm going to stop with predictions as of when things get revealed or when Donna comes in the picture. I am however going to say that you and The Doctor will learn the story behind the memory before Donna shows up.  
> The silver bracelet that Martha's wearing is a reference to my one shot Surprise Me  
> I added that story to the series as the first one, so you might've already read it.


	5. Sensations And Headaches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this fic is still going horribly, I had trouble with the chapter again, I have a bit of trouble connecting the previous chapters to my ideas for future chapters, but I'm getting there, I hope. I still don't have a clear path from here towards Donna, I do know what I'm going to do with her, though.  
> I do however have an idea for next chapter, but more on that later as that still won't help me getting to Donna. Just be patience I'll be getting there hopefully within 10 chapters ;)  
> Also, I'm not entirely satisfied, actually I'm not satisfied at all, with the chapter title but this was the best thing I could think of. So if you have a better idea, please let me know ;)

* * *

"Doctor!"

Martha managed to catch The Doctor just before he hit the floor. She quickly checked the beats of his hearts, which she discovered was a bit faster than normal. She also wasn't entirely satisfied with his breathing, which was a bit irregular. But neither was so bad that she had to do something about it.

Then she registered the screaming that was coming from the phone she had dropped.

_Jack!_

Martha quickly grabbed a pillow and laid The Doctor's head on it before picking up the phone and putting it on speaker.

"Jack!" She broke through him calling out for her and The Doctor.

"Martha! What's going on, what happened? Do I need to co-" He ranted a bit, obviously concerned.

Jack!" She cut him off again. "Calm down. I know that you're thinking it but no alien showed up."

She told him as she grabbed a thermometer for The Doctor to see whether he had a fever.

"Then what _did_ happen?" Jack asked.

"The Doctor's passed out." She told him as she measured his temperature.

"Why?"

"I don't know, although he said that something had happened which was causing him to have trouble thinking." She looked at the temperature. "He doesn't have a fever." She announced to Jack.

"What about his heartbeat?"

"His heartbeat is a bit fast and his breathing is a bit irregular, but both are already getting better." She said as she checked them again.

"Okay, do you want me and Mickey to come and help?"

"No... not yet, I want to see if I can figure out what's wrong with him." At that point The Doctor groaned, so she moved towards him and started running her hand through his hair.

"Doctor... hey... wake up..." He groaned again.

* * *

The Doctor slowly came back to awareness at the sound of Martha's voice and the feeling of her hand through his hair, which was causing way too many nerves to activate and he could already feel the risk of passing out another time.

"Please, stop doing that." He murmured barely audible.

Martha heard him anyway and stopped running her hand through his hair.

"Is that better?" She asked him.

He nodded.

"Yeah." He kept murmuring.

Martha picked her phone up.

"I'll call you back Jack." She told him and hung up, then she turned back to The Doctor.

"What happened?" She asked.

He groaned.

"You're loud." He whispered.

"Too loud?" She asked softer.

"That's better." He took a deep breath. "Sorry about passing out."

Martha bit back a laugh at that, afraid that the sound would hurt him with the sound.

"This is so you, apologising for something that you couldn't help."

"But that's the thing."

"You knew you would pass out?"

"Not really."

"How do you mean?"

"What happened to my mind this morning."

"Passing out it as a side effect of that?"

"Yeah... it's a rare one, though, well it depends on how ehmm... intense it was."

"Intense?"

"The impact of what happened can vary from next to nothing and a lot."

"I guess that you're closer to a lot."

"Yeah."

"What decides the impact?"

"I don't think that I can explain now... or ever."

"Okay, well it happened, what do you need to get better ?"

"Take some time alone with as little stimulus as possible to sort out my mind."

"Okay, I suspect that the TARDIS would be the best place for that?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, do you think that you could open your eyes?"

He opened them slightly and directly closed them again with a hiss in pain.

"I take that as a no then." Martha concluded. "Would it help if I dim the light a bit?"

"Maybe."

"Okay, I'll be right back." She said as she stood up to go and close the curtains.

"Okay."

* * *

The curtains caused the room to darken significantly, however it wasn't completely dark as a bit of light escaped from the sides of the curtains, but she figured that it would be enough.

She crouched back down next to The Doctor.

"Okay, want to try again?" She asked him.

"Not really." He admitted but slowly reopened his eyes anyway and didn't close them this time.

"How does that feel?"

"Worse than with my eyes closed, but it's manageable." He looked at her and directly averted his gaze with a hiss, it somehow was a lot more difficult to look at her, okay, he could explain that by saying that the memory lock mostly contained memories about Martha which meant that she triggered memories a bit more than other things he could look at. He hoped that Martha wouldn't question his reaction.

 _Of course_ , no such luck.

"What's it?" Martha asked concerned.

"Do you think you could help me to get up?" He asked to avoid having to answer her.

Martha realised this but decided not to call him on it, yet.

"Sure." She carefully grabbed him by the arm, careful not to touch his hurt wrists and The Doctor tried to ignore the sensations he got from Martha touching him.

_Oh... this was a bad idea._

Martha led him to the TARDIS and opened the door with her key.

"Do you want to go to your bedroom?" She asked him.

He just nodded in answer so she led him there.

* * *

After a bit of a struggle, she had managed to get him into pyjamas and in bed.

"Do you need anything else before I go?" She asked him as she tucked him in. The TARDIS had provided him with a voice-activated phone if he needed her. She was going to go and get some groceries as she was running low on supplies like he was, so it was really necessary.

"No." The Doctor mumbled barely awake, the abuse of his brain cells with incentives had really drained him. In the time it took to get him into bed The Doctor had managed to explain that he could take care of this while he was sleeping as long as he didn't get disturbed, so after she left the room, she would only come here if he called her. He had also told her that it would take at least 8 hours to get himself sorted out, but there was a fair chance that it would take a few hours longer.

"Okay, call if you need anything." She said as she stood up to leave.

"Yeah." He mumbled.

Martha closed the door and let out a breath, at least he was going to be okay, at least, if she could believe him. While he was being very vague on what was exactly going on with him, he seemed to be confident that he could sort this out, however, that didn't change the fact that she hated seeing him like this, it was still the man she used to love, not minding that he had changed.

Oh who was she kidding but herself, she still loved him and that would never change.

She sighed, she needed to stop thinking about it, if she kept doing that things would never work out with Mickey. She nodded to herself and walked towards the console room remembering her promise to Jack and pulled out her phone to call him.

"Martha!" She heard almost instantly.

"Jack."

"What happened?!" Jack asked concerned.

"I already told you, The Doctor passed out."

"Yeah, but how is he now!?" Jack pressed.

"He's okay, resting now, though."

"But what caused him to pass out?"

"He got too many sensations on top the fact that he already had trouble thinking, like I said he's resting and according to him that's all he'll need."

"So he'll be fine... good to hear." Martha heard some sort of crash in the background.

"What was that?"

"Oh, I've gotta go, keep me updated." And then he hung up.

Martha frowned to herself wondering what was going on, but she knew that Jack could take care of himself so she didn't really worry about it too much.

She grabbed her keys and left the house to do the shopping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was the chapter, not much happening here, but it's basically a bit of a bridge between last chapter and next chapter. Well, I said not much happening here, but we learned that Martha still loves The Doctor after all this time and being married to Mickey! Does this mean that The Doctor might still have a chance when he finally stops being such a dumbo (a head nod towards Donna.)? The next chapter will be about The Doctor sorting out the side effects of the memory lock, so he and you will learn why The Doctor put it there in the first place and The Doctor will have a clearer view on his feelings for Martha.  
> At least that's the plan for next chapter and we all know how good I'm at following plans ;)


	6. The Forgotten Memories - Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor is reviewing the memories he had forgotten before unlocking the memory lock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter you will see memories The Doctor didn't remember before unlocking the memory lock, so basically the non-platonic thoughts and feelings from The Doctor, of course not all of them are covered but just a few, I actually split this chapter in 2, this part contains mostly The Doctor battling his feelings but no real plot, in the next chapter there will be 2 or 3 more of these small stories but it will also contain a bit of a climax with the explanation of the memory lock so stay tuned.

* * *

The Doctor was fast asleep within seconds after Martha had closed the door, he could sort out the memories from the memory lock while he was asleep and so he did just that, he needed to place every single memory in its timeline to sort it out, in the meantime he also needed to figure out why he had put up a memory lock in the first place. This would take hours, so he picked the first memory he saw and began.

* * *

The Doctor fiddled with the bow tie of his tux as he waited for Martha to get dressed. They had agreed to go to this party from this guy called Lazarus, he would've been gone if it hadn't been Martha's mother calling and saying that her sister was on TV and then this Lazarus guy had said that he would change what it means to be human and this had sparked his interest. He actually hadn't wanted her to leave, but he knew that it was a bad idea for her to stay so she had to leave. That hadn't changed change the fact that it had actually hurt to leave her, something he cursed himself for, he had only known her for a few days! But he could actual file that away as his natural hate for goodbyes.

_This is different!_

The rebellious voice in his head said which he quickly silenced, it wasn't true after all.

He somehow was glad that he had a reason to stay a bit longer, though. This really surprised him, it meant that he would have to say goodbye a second time and that was something he liked to avoid at all costs, he would rather just say goodbye and never come back to have to face it another time, but somehow this felt different.

He got pulled out of his thoughts as he heard the door to of Martha's bedroom open to reveal Martha dressed in a dark purple dress that went to around her knees. She had her hair braided and had let it down, which looked really nice on her. In fact, she was so beautiful that his brain short-circuited for a moment and he couldn't help but stare at her.

Martha, who, unbeknownst to him, had been eyeing him in his tux as well, seemed to notice this.

"Doctor?" She asked cautiously, this was enough to reboot his brain.

"Yeah?" Had his voice always been that squeaky? He cleared his throat and tried again. "Yeah?" This time his voice sounded normal.

"How do I look? Do you think that this will do?"

"You look bea- _BRIliant!_ " He had nearly said beautiful, he didn't want her to think that he fancied her, he didn't, absolutely not, but she might think that. "I think that will do, besides I don't think that you have enough time left to change anyway."

At that, she turned to look at the clock and noticed that he was right.

"Yeah, we should probably go." She agreed with him then she looked him over another time and looked down at his shoes. "Really, you're wearing Converses with your tux?" She asked him.

"What's wrong with that? They're comfortable and knowing my luck I'll probably end up running at some time."

She shook her head at him fondly, as she had to agree with him. "Fair enough."

"I believe we got a party to attend." He offered her his arm, she took it and they left Martha's flat together.

* * *

John Smith was working on the details of the drawing of his maid, he knew that it was improper but he just couldn't keep his mind from it and he simply had to draw her. Martha Jones was beautiful and kind and different, she actually had a bit of trouble with authority but he found that he liked that, she wasn't as average as everyone else. He was just finished as he heard a knock on the door he quickly hid the drawing under some of his paperwork and quickly busied himself with said paperwork.

"Come in." He called out.

Martha came in carrying a tray with tea.

"I brought tea, sir."

"Oh that's nice, you can set that down." He indicated the empty spot the desk he was sitting at.

"As you wish, sir." She said as she did as was told.

"Thank you." He smiled at her.

"You're welcome, do you need anything else before I leave, sir?"

"No I don't, you're dismissed." He gave her another smile and continued with his work as she left.

After she left he quickly got the drawing out from under his papers again, crossed towards his dresser and put it on top of the other drawings he had made of her. No one could see them, it would be a scandal if anyone thought that he fancied his maid, well knew that he fancied his maid, he couldn't tell her either, what would she _think!?_ A better question was how was he even going to tell her something like that, it had taken him some time to actually act normal around her. He wasn't brave enough to tell her something like that. He sighed as he ran a hand down his face, he would just have to get over it, it was just a crush, it would pass. At least that was what he was telling himself. He was perfectly capable of finding someone else more suitable, the matron was quite nice in his opinion. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and started on his paperwork.

* * *

Shakespeare was flirting with Martha and for some reason, one he didn't know himself, this really angered The Doctor but he just pushed his feelings away. It wasn't like he could say anything about it without getting an angry look or more from Martha, he had just met her but he just knew that doing something like that would rub her in the wrong way. On the other hand, if Shakespeare hadn't had a liking to Martha, they wouldn't have met him properly. However, that didn't mean that he had to like the flirting bit.

As they were on their way towards Bedlam Hospital he could hear Shakespeare having another go at seducing Martha.

"So, tell me of Freedonia, where women can be doctors, writers, actors."

"This country's ruled by a woman." Martha pointed out.

"Ah, she's royal. That's God's business. Though you are a royal beauty." Shakespeare flirted and The Doctor felt his blood boil at that. Luckily for him, Martha didn't want it either. He could hear her stop walking so he stopped too.

"Whoa, Nelly! I know for a fact you've got a wife in the country." The Doctor turned around to them.

"But Martha, this is town." Shakespeare whined and The Doctor decided to intervene.

"Come on. We can all have a good flirt later." If flirting with Shakespeare would help with getting the Bard's attention away from Martha he would jump willingly in bed with the writer.

Well, not entirely that, he wasn't _that_ bothered with Shakespeare flirting with Martha.

At least that was what he was telling himself.

"Is that a promise, Doctor?"

"Oh, 57 academics just punched the air." And he was mentally punching the air too, glad that he might actually be able to distract Shakespeare from Martha.

This turned out to not be entirely true as Shakespeare obviously preferred Martha over him, The Doctor could barely contain his anger when Shakespeare quoted his famous Dark Lady sonnet. The Doctor would probably have done something he would've regretted if it hadn't been for Queen Elizabeth I interrupting them.

* * *

He had to do it, it was to save a thousand lives, it wasn't like there was another way, well, there was but nothing that worked this good. Yet he couldn't help himself from enjoying that kiss and it might've gotten a tiny bit more intimate than necessary, but he simply enjoyed kissing. He was still a bloke after all and which bloke wouldn't enjoy kissing a handsome lady? Well, okay which bloke that was attracted to females. Because, yes, Martha was handsome that was a fact everyone attracted to females would agree with and maybe some that weren't.

* * *

The Doctor was really worried about Martha, she had been kidnapped by this couple, he had been told by those pharmacists that they had taken her to the motorway so they could have special access because they were carrying three adults.

He had been furious because of this and had taken out a bit of his anger towards the pharmacists, to be honest, they had had it coming too, selling these chemicals.

_ugh._

He didn't know why but having Martha taken away from him really hurt.

 _Why? I've hardly known her for two days!_ He berated himself.

Besides, he would take her home after this anyway, but then again he would know that she was safe then, now he was anything but sure that she was safe.

He wasn't in the right state of mind to realise that if what the pharmacists had told him was true, the kidnappers wouldn't hurt her without losing their access to the fast lane.

The Doctor also hadn't been in his right mind when he opened the door to the motorway, walked in and just stood there breathing it in. Luckily for The Doctor's health, a cat man opened the door from his car and coaxed The Time Lord into his car.

* * *

The Doctor was now getting more frustrated by the minute, the police wouldn't answer his calls, he could be stuck here for another 6 months if he couldn't figure a way out, he still had no means of reaching Martha and while they were nice to him he was not pleased with being stuck with cats, like he had told Rose, he was not a cat person.

He had however found out in which car Martha was, but he couldn't get through to her so he could not do much with that information, yet.

* * *

The cats wouldn't take him down towards the fast lane either so he had finally decided to go and find his own way down, he had to find Martha!

He had managed to get down to the last lane before the fast lane and had learned something he was not happy about at all.

Martha was among Macra's and that was really bad, The Doctor was very very worried about Martha's well-being. He needed to find a way down, unfortunately before he could even start thinking of a way to get to her, Novice Hame, the cat nurse who apparently had set to better her life, got into the car and teleported them to the Senate, where he learned what had happened, all of a sudden he wasn't as angry anymore, he was just disturbed. Of course, his worry about Martha was all but forgotten.

The Doctor was quickly working on the wires to let everyone on the motorway out of the motorway, which automatically would save Martha too if she was still alive.

The Doctor got a painful feeling in his chest at the idea of Martha not surviving this.

 _No!_ He mentally shook his head. _Martha's clever she can look after herself, even when there are Macra's. I'm sure that she can stay alive long enough for me to do this._

Novice Hame asked him what he was going to do and he answered.

"This." As he flipped the two-metre-long switch on the floor and his hearts sank to his stomach as all the lights on the console went out.

"No, no no no no, no!" _Martha!_ The Doctor couldn't remember the last time he had felt so worried.

He quickly went to solving the problem but was unable to, until the Face of Boe stepped in and gave his life force to save the city and Martha.

The Doctor thought that he would regenerate on the spot of happiness when he finally heard Martha's voice again over the communicator.

_Thank god!_

* * *

The Doctor looked at Martha who was enchanted by the hymn of the New New York citizens, he felt this odd but pleasant feeling in his chest at the sight of her expression. He didn't know why but he felt more at ease around Martha than he had ever felt around Rose and he had only known Martha for _2 days!_ While he had known Rose for almost _2 years._

 _What is it about this girl?_ The Doctor found himself wondering as he contemplated how much he would tell her about the Time War, nothing wasn't an option anymore.

 _Just the general outlines._ He decided, although in the back of his mind he knew that he would tell her a lot more, he didn't know why, nor did he want to admit this.

He took a deep breath and started admitting the truth.

"I lied to you, 'cause I liked it. I could pretend. Just for a bit, I could imagine they were still alive, underneath a burnt orange sky."

He saw her expression grow sad and he felt the pleasant feeling in his chest change to one that hurt him.

"I'm not just a Time Lord. I'm the last of the Time Lords. The Face of Boe was wrong. There's no one else."

Martha shook her head slightly at him and he really wished he could change the subject, just to make her smile again. He didn't know why he had this urge to make her happy again. Well, he did ~~love~~ _like!_ her smile.

_Why does it hurt so much to see her so sad?_

"What happened?" Martha decided to ask him and her expression was one of sadness and compassion. And at that moment he was ready to admit to himself that he, indeed, would tell her a lot more than he originally intended to. He looked in her eyes for a moment, then he proceeded to grab his own chair to sit across her and started telling her about the Time War and Gallifrey and the feeling in his chest got once again replaced by that pleasant but odd feeling he had earlier as he saw the awe on her face as he told her about the good things of his lost home planet.

* * *

The Doctor looked at Martha, who awkwardly started to utter something after they moved away from the subject of Joan.

"I meant to say back there, last night... I would have said anything to get you to change."

He didn't know why but his hearts dropped at that. He knew what she meant, that little speech had made quite the impression on John Smith who had had a crush on Martha, but had been hiding it until the bitter end, something The Doctor was grateful for as it could've made things between him and Martha a lot more awkward than it already was.

"Oh yeah, of course, you would. Yeah." He said convinced that he didn't sound deflated.

"I mean, I wasn't really..." The Doctor ignored the painful feeling in his chest and just tried to get them away from this subject because somehow, this subject hurt him a lot and he didn't know why.

"Oh, no, no."

"Good."

"Fine." There was a bit of an awkward silence.

"So here we are then." Martha said to break it.

"There we are, yes." To which Martha nodded.

"And I never said thanks for lookin' after me." He pulled her into this huge bear hug, something he found he had really missed as John Smith.

* * *

The Doctor looked numbly at the console, feeling terrible after the day they had, he was exhausted. Having a sun possessing you really took it out of you. That, however, wasn't the main reason he was feeling so bad, he would be perfectly fine physically after a good night's rest anyway.

What was bothering was something he actually couldn't explain, he had witnessed the kiss between Martha and Riley and this somehow had caused a very painful feeling in his chest and also caused him to be sad.

And he didn't know why.

Why would he feel that way about a kiss? It was just a kiss, just that, nothing special about it. Yet somehow The Doctor couldn't help but wish that it was him who had been kissed.

He shook his head mentally.

_Of course, I don't! Where did that thought come from?_

He was still deep in thought as Martha walked in.

"So! Didn't really need you in the end, did we?!" She remarked as she walked up to him, then obviously noticed his expression. "Sorry, how're you doing?"

The Doctor shook himself out of it and just started rambling instead of answering.

"Now! What do you say? Ice skating on the mineral lakes of Cuhlhan. Fancy it?"

He did not miss the disappointed look on her face and felt the painful feeling in his chest become worse at seeing that, he ached to make her feel better, but he really didn't want to talk about his feelings about her kiss with Riley.

Especially since he didn't actually understand his feelings about said kiss.

Besides, what would she think if she discovered that he had witnessed it through the _scanner_!?


	7. The Forgotten Memories - Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the continuation of the previous chapter, however, I decided to split it into 3 parts so this is the build-up towards the climax, which will be part 3. This part unlike the previous one is completely chronologically.

* * *

 "You're the one that kissed me." The Doctor stiffened mentally at that.

"That was a genetic transfer." While this was true he somehow couldn't stop thinking about how good that kiss had felt, ever since he had pulled back from it.

"And if you will wear a tight suit..." The Doctor stiffened a bit more at that comment, but this time not just mentally.

He turned to her. "Now... don't!"

"And then travel all the way across the universe just to ask me on a date." The Doctor mentally groaned, she was driving him insane with her comments.

"Stop it." He demanded, hoping that he could keep his dignity, which he certainly couldn't if she kept going on like this.

"For the record? I'm not remotely interested. I only go for humans."

He didn't know why, but The Doctor felt his hearts drop at that comment but kept his composure.

"Good. Well, then." The Doctor started naming things to distract him from the sadness he was feeling from that comment, well, at least he didn't have to worry about his dignity anymore.

* * *

The Doctor and Martha had to share a bed in the Elephant Inn, somehow he was quite pleased with the idea.

"Are you going to stand there all night?" He asked Martha as she didn't join him on the bed.

This caused Martha to sit down on the bed next to him.

"Budge up a bit, then." He moves a bit to the left to make room for her, "Sorry, there's not much room. Us two here, same bed. Tongues will wag."

The Doctor tried to act like she hadn't made that comment, but his body certainly wasn't complying to his will, thankfully Martha didn't seem to notice that. So he started talking about what was going on to distract himself.

"There's such a thing as psychic energy but a human couldn't channel it like that. Not without a generator the size of Taunton and I think we'd have spotted that." He turned on his side to face Martha. "No. There's something I'm missing, Martha." She also turned to face him and this somehow made him a bit nervous. "Something really close, staring me right in the face and I can't see it." At this point the intimate position between him and Martha caused The Doctor to have some inappropriate thoughts and he tried to think of Rose to keep him off that track. "Rose would know. A friend of mine, Rose. Right now, she'd say exactly the right thing." His plan, however, wasn't helping much so he turned to lie on his back again before he did something he would regret. "Still, can't be helped. You're a novice, never mind. I'll take you back home tomorrow."

"Great." Martha said sounding annoyed and turned to blow out the candle.

The Doctor wondered why she was annoyed, he suspected maybe because he would take her home tomorrow but then he reviewed what he had said.

_Oh god! Did I really just say that she wasn't nearly as good as Rose!?_

The Doctor mentally kicked himself, he didn't even think that about Martha, she was brilliant and he had really just implied that she was worthless in his eyes?

He mentally cursed.

_That's what you get if you try to distract yourself from inappropriate thoughts._

He wanted to say sorry but was afraid of her reaction, on the other hand, why would she be angry at him for apologising? So he decided to risk it.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to …." He trailed off, not entirely sure what exactly it was what he had done, but he knew that he shouldn't have said what he had said. He sighed. "I didn't mean it like that, or... well... now... yeah, I didn't mean it like that."

She turned to face him again and he just turned his head to look at her, he could see her perfectly fine in this light because of his Gallifreyan eyesight, but he knew enough of human biology to know that she didn't see him as clear as he saw her.

He ran a hand over his face. "I don't really think that. I don't know why I said that. I will still take you home tomorrow, though"

"It's alright Doctor." She said softly.

"No it isn't, I shouldn't have said that."

"It's alright." She repeated a bit more firmly this time.

"But..."

"No buts I already forgave you and frankly I'd like to go to sleep now."

"Right, yeah... good night."

"Good night." She answered back as she turned around again. The Doctor didn't need to sleep so he just ended up thinking about everything that had happened, however, he was not just thinking about what was going on here also about the girl laying next to him, he had never felt like this around anyone but it didn't feel wrong. He sighed internally, he might've kept her as a companion if what happened with Rose hadn't been so recently. He had also realised that he somehow made people wrongly believe that he loved Rose, well he _did_ love her, but more like a sister than a lover, she reminded him of the younger sister he had on Gallifrey. That was why it hurt him so much that she was lost, it felt like losing his sister after regaining her again. He wasn't ready to move on and take on a new companion. But that didn't change the fact that deep in his hearts he knew that he wouldn't bring Martha home tomorrow.

* * *

The Doctor and Martha were hiding in the device that had changed Lazarus into the monster he was now and they were pressed up tightly against each other. Just the close proximately was making it quite difficult to think for him and he didn't know why, on the other hand, it had been a while since a body had been pressed against him like that. He shook his head mentally, he certainly wasn't going down _that_ road!

"Are we hiding?" Martha's voice snapped him out of his thoughts.

"No, he knows we're here. But this is his masterpiece. I'm betting he won't destroy it, not even to get at us."

"But we're trapped!" Martha exclaimed

"Well, yeah, that's a slight problem." _Another problem would be how tightly we are pressed together, but let's forget about that, well at least try._ He added mentally while he was really wondering why he kept thinking things like that, it wasn't like he was attracted to her.

 _Right?_ a treacherous voice in his head wondered, which he quickly silenced

"You mean you don't have a plan?" Martha questioned him

"Yes, the plan was to get inside here!" The Time Lord admitted.  _Which, in afterthought, really wasn't one of my best plans, I really thought that there would be more room in here._

"Then what?"

"Well... then I'd come up with another plan." _If only I could concentrate!_

"In your own time, then." Martha said sarcastically. 

He tried to reach in his jacket for the sonic screwdriver but this caused their position to be a bit errr.. closer. He accidentally hit Martha with his elbow while getting the screwdriver.

"Hey!" She exclaimed at this.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry." He apologised as he finally managed to pull out the sonic screwdriver. "Here we are."

"What are you gonna do with that?"

"Improvise." He answers as he slid down slowly towards the floor as he tried not to think about the close proximately towards Martha's _legs!_

_Blimey, she has some beautiful legs._

The Doctor found himself mesmerised by her legs but somehow managed to pop open a panel, while resisting the urge to do something a little inappropriate to her legs.

He mentally shook his head.

 _Mind out of the gutter, Doctor!_ He scolded himself, they were in mortal danger and here he was thinking about how kissable Martha's legs are.

 _Oh god! I really need to concentrate._ He looked at the legs a bit more. _Not on her legs! The wires!_

It is safe to say that he was having a hard time down there.

And since he was also thinking that previous statement it wasn't getting any easier for him.

_Curse the innuendo!_

Luckily Martha, unbeknownst to her, came to his rescue by asking a question.

"I still don't understand where that thing came from. Is it alien?"

"No, for once it's strictly human in origin." He said as he used the sonic on the wires attached to the panel.

"Human? How can it be human?"

"Probably from dormant genes in Lazarus's DNA. The energy field in this thing must have reactivated them. And it looks like they're becoming dominant."

"So it's a throwback."

"Some option that evolution rejected for you millions of years ago, but the potential is still there. Locked away in your genes, but the potential is still there. Locked away in your genes, forgotten about until Lazarus unlocked it by mistake." He told her as he continued to work on the wires.

"It's like Pandora's box." She realised.

"Exactly." And he finally lost a part of his concentration and had to comment. "Nice shoes, by the way."

At that moment the machine power up and a blue light filled the capsule.

"Doctor, what's happening?"

"Sounds like he's switched the machine on."

"That's not good, is it?"

"Well, I was hoping it was gonna take him a little bit longer to work that out." Then the machine started to spin.

"I don't want to hurry you, but …"

"I know, I know. Nearly done." He was still having trouble concentrating, this was really _not_ the right moment to get distracted.

"What're you doin'?"

"Trying to set the capsule to reflect energy rather than receive it." He answered as he once again tried to keep his attention from her legs.

"Will that kill him?"

"When he transforms, he's three times his size, cellular triplication, so he's spreading himself thin."

"We're gonna end up like him!"

"Just one more!" Which was really fortunate because just as he finished the machine activated and knocked Lazarus away. Then The Doctor stood up again, opened the door and stepped out, Martha following him.

"I thought we were gonna go through the blender then." She admitted.

"Really shouldn't take that long just to reverse the polarity. I must be out of practice." _of avoiding having inappropriate thoughts at inconvenient moments..._ He shook his head mentally again, Time Lords weren't supposed to have them in the first place, so he really had to avoid having inappropriate thoughts at all.

* * *

The Doctor walked into the chambers of John Smith at Farringham before the police arrived, he had used the TARDIS to travel back in time while Martha was sleeping, about a week after they originally had left, while walking into the chambers he had to think about Joan, he had liked her as John Smith but not in the way he had pretended, because that was what John Smith had been doing, pretending to fancy the nurse because he couldn't be with the one he actually fancied. The Doctor ran a hand over his face as he contemplated this, he didn't know why John had ended up with a crush on Martha, but he knew that it had come from somewhere within him like he had said to Joan, John's still somewhere inside himself. He sighed, it probably was because he himself was close friends with Martha and that connection had passed towards John in the way it has, but The Doctor just didn't know why it had to be in the form of a crush, he didn't actually fancy Martha, so why would his human version?

He sighed again, it was probably just a coincidence, misinterpretation of his essence or something similar.

He shook his head, he had been thinking about this the better part of the week and, if he was honest with himself, he still hadn't come to a conclusion, the previous assumption didn't make much sense as that just wasn't how the chameleon arch was supposed to work. He knew that he would either never figure it out or figure it out at a random moment when he wasn't thinking about it.

He walked further into the room and set on the task at hand.

He hadn't been able to stop thinking about something that was left in John Smith's dresser, something related to the exact same subject as he had just been thinking about. He walked towards the dresser and opened it. He had been fine with Joan having the journal but he didn't want anyone to find the drawings he had made of Martha as John Smith so this was the exact reason he had come back, to retrieve the drawings of his precio- _Martha!_

He picked up the most recent one, and softly stroked his finger over the hair, careful not to smudge out the pencil drawing. Then he picked up another, looked at it and sighed. He had come here with the intention to destroy them but now that he saw them again he couldn't do it, he sighed once more and carefully put all the drawings in his jacket pocket and went back to the TARDIS.

* * *

The Doctor had just walked back in the console room and sent them back into the time vortex when he heard a scream coming from the corridors, he recognised it to be Martha's scream and suspected that she was having a nightmare. He quickly made his way towards her bedroom, opened the door and got his suspicions confirmed as she was thrashing around and whimpering. He quickly got over there and started running his hand through her hair trying to calm her down.

"Doctor!" She screamed at the top of her lungs, which made him winch. Not from the loud sound but from the fact that this probably meant that he was the cause of the nightmare.

"I'm here and everything's just fine." He said in a soothing tone.

"Jettison." She murmured "Sun."

This made The Doctor winch again as he realised that she was probably dreaming about the SS Pentallian, he had not so pleasant memories about that himself, actually, he had nightmares about that too. He should've guessed that she would've had nightmares herself as she had had a close call back then too.

"Oh Martha, I'm so sorry, so sorry for everything." A single tear ran down his cheek before he composed himself again and gathered her in his arms, hugging her in her sleep, hoping to scare the bad dream away. Somewhere between that moment and the moment Martha woke up he ended up falling asleep himself, something he did actually need as he had been avoiding sleep himself in the past week as he didn't want to get a nightmare himself. Fortunately, he didn't get any nightmares this time.

* * *

The next morning he woke up slowly and was faced with Martha, who had woken up before him and was staring up at him, she was still lying on his chest and had yet to make an attempt to move away.

"Hello." He said rather awkwardly, very aware of the fact that she hadn't given him any permission to be in her bed. He mentally cursed himself for falling asleep, he had planned to leave before she woke up.

"Hello." She said back to him then looked pointedly across the room. "Any particular reason why you're in my bed like this?"

"Well, I think there is." He said, still quite nervous.

"Okay, and would you care to enlighten me on the topic?"

"Well, you see... I was working on the console and well... oh long story short, I'm pretty sure that you had a nightmare and well... it seemed to help." He gestured at the bed, making it obvious what he meant. "I didn't mean to fall asleep myself, though." He smiled sheepishly.

"It's okay. You must've been tired or you wouldn't have fallen asleep."

"I suppose."

"When was the last time you slept?" Martha asked him.

"Less than five minutes ago." He answered cheekily, causing her to hit him playfully.

"Not counting tonight." She added.

He smiled sheepishly again.

"Well..."

"How long has it been?"

"I'm not exactly sure." He admitted.

"And if you had to guess?"

"Can't, not sure whether I should count when I slept as..." He swallowed and looked away shyly, they hadn't talked about it at all, besides the short mention of what she had said to convince John Smith to open the watch and if he was honest with himself, he didn't feel like talking about it. "You know..."

She sighed.

"Yeah." She didn't feel like talking about it either.

They laid in silence for a few minutes until Martha spoke up.

"How about breakfast?"

"Not a bad idea, but we're out of food."

"We can go out for breakfast." She suggested. "And then do the shopping directly afterwards."

"I can agree with that plan." He chuckled. "How about we both get dressed and meet up in the console room in ehh 10 minutes?"

"Make that 15 minutes and we have a deal." She frowned. "Hold on, you're still dressed."

"Yeah, but I want to get changed."

"Okay." She said as she rolled off him and went towards her bathroom.

"I'll see you in 15 minutes." He said as he quickly retreated from the room.

* * *

When she walked into the console room about 15 minuted later The Doctor was already working on the console room.

"So! London, 2007." He turned to Martha. "How does that sound?"

"Sounds good."

The Doctor set the coordinates and landed the TARDIS with her usual stutters.

"So let's go!" He said, at that point alarm went off. The Doctor quickly went towards the screen to see what happened.

"Interesting..." he mused.

"What is it?"

"There are some oddities in this old house nearby, we should probably check that out after breakfast and then go shopping?" He suggested.

"Okay." She agreed. "Can we get breakfast now?"

"Yes, let's go!" He grabbed his coat, put it on and headed towards the door.

* * *

After breakfast, they went to visit the old house where the TARDIS had picked up the oddities, they had decided to split up, Martha went upstairs and The Doctor downstairs, The Doctor had just pulled out his sonic when he noticed a Weeping Angel.

"Martha!" He yelled at her as he kept his eyes on it.

At that moment he heard a squeak upstairs, one he identified as coming from Martha.

_She must've found another one!_

"Doctor! I think this statue just moved."

"Yeah, it did. Don't blink Martha, they won't move if you look at them."

She squeaked again.

"There's another one."

"Right same rules!" he yelled upstairs.

"What are they?!"

"You want to do that _now?_!" The Doctor answered indignantly.

"Okay, fair eno-" Martha's sentence got cut off abruptly.

"Martha!?" The next moment he felt himself being pulled in time, it felt as if millions of little forces were pulling at him.

The next moment he was about a metre in the air falling towards the street, he landed rather hard on his shoulder and then turned to lie on his back catching his breath. He hated travelling without a capsule for a reason, he closed his eyes tightly hoping that the dizziness and the headache he had would go away soon.

"Doctor!" He heard a voice call him.

 _Martha_ his brain finally supplied.

He groaned.

"Hey, are you okay?" He felt her touching his cheek.

He groaned again, the dizziness was going away but the headache was still there, as bad as a moment ago.

He risked opening his eyes a bit and closed them again immediately with another groan.

"Ohhh my head!"

"It's okay, I had that too, just lay down for a while and it should go away."

"I know. Wait, how long have you been here?"

"About half an hour, I was getting worried!"

He groaned another time.

"Oi, not so loud!"

"Sorry." She said talking softly again, she still had her hand on his cheek rubbing comforting circles with her thumb.

They sat there in silence for a few minutes before The Doctor finally dared to open his eyes again, this time successfully, even though it still hurt. He carefully managed to get into a sitting position.

"So, where are we?"

"1968, London."

The Doctor frowned as he remembered Sally Sparrow and quickly reached into his pocket for the folder she had given him and browsed through it a bit.

"Well... I'm afraid that we might be stuck here for a bit." He started to get to his feet, carefully. "We better find a place to stay."

Martha agreed with him and together they went to look for a flat to stay in for the next few months.


	8. The Forgotten Memories - Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, this is part 3 like said before this is the climax of the previous two chapters. Also, I'd like to say in advance that the next update wouldn't be anytime soon as I started a huge project with a few other writers and I'll be working on that. I'm pretty sure it will be posted here.

The Doctor and Martha had been stuck in the sixties for about a year now, they had lived through Christmas 1968, New Year and now it was March 1969. The Doctor had finished the Timey-Wimey detector and now they were waiting for Billy Shipton to arrive.

The Doctor was cooking dinner when he heard the door open, indicating that Martha was home. The situation was a lot better now than it had been a few months ago. It had gotten a lot better since last Christmas for Martha, she had had a breather back then and The Doctor was pretty sure that had been exactly what she had needed.

"Hey Doctor." She sounded quite happy, which he could understand, she had a week off, something Scott, her boss, had arranged.

"Hey Martha, how was your day then?" He asked as he put the dinner on the table, he ha had enough experience with Martha's schedule to be able to time dinner really well.

Martha told him about her day during dinner, about a woman who just couldn't figure out what she wanted and Martha admitted to being really annoyed with her by the time she finally made a decision. The Doctor was having a bit of trouble following the story, something he normally could do perfectly fine, it wasn't like it was difficult. He was also feeling nauseous all of a sudden, not too bad that he would throw up, yet, but he certainly lost his appetite because of this.

Martha had noticed this.

"Doctor, why aren't you eating?"

"Not hungry." He said, it wasn't exactly a lie, he wasn't hungry because of his nausea.

Martha rose a questioning eyebrow.

"You feeling alright?"

"Yes! Perfectly fine." He lied, he didn't want her to worry about him as she had already done that a lot of times, he had been sick _27_ times since they have been in the sixties, he knew that he had been sick so often because of the chameleon arch, it had weakened his immune system. She had looked after him all those times, at least when she hadn't been at work.

He was hoping that he wasn't getting sick again, it had been a bit longer since he had been sick this time, which meant that his immune system was getting stronger again, but he also knew that it wasn't back to normal again and that he still risked getting ill from diseases he normally would be immune for.

Martha looked sceptically at him.

"You sure?"

"Yes, I'm fine. Nothing's wro-" He trailed off as his stomach churned ominously, his eyes widened, he quickly got up and made a dash for the loo, just in time for his stomach to reject its content.

He mentally cursed while his stomach was emptying itself. He felt Martha kneeling next to him, rubbing his back in a soothing way.

When his stomach finally was empty he flushed the toilet, shifted back a bit and looked at Martha, who was handing him a glass of water which he accepted and shakily took a sip from.

"How do you feel?" Martha asked him.

"Terrible." He admitted barely above a whisper, while he had just felt nauseous before, which thankfully had almost gone away now, he had an headache, he was cold and was really tired all of a sudden. He handed her the glass back, which she set away and then pulled him into a comforting hug.

They sat like this until he started shivering violently.

"Why don't we get you to bed, huh?" Martha suggested.

He just nodded, he didn't have enough energy to do much more than that. She let go of him and started helping him.

He couldn't believe how weak he felt, especially not since he had felt perfectly fine not 10 minutes ago.

He somehow managed to get up with Martha's help and she guided him towards the bedroom that they shared, he all but collapsed on the bed and curled up as a ball wanting to go to sleep.

Martha went away, he couldn't see where she went but when she came back she was carrying his pyjamas and he groaned at the prospect of having to change.

"Come on, you need to change, you can't sleep in those clothes." Martha told him as she sat down on the bed next to him.

He just groaned again.

"I'll help you." She told him. "But I can't undress you like this."

He sighed at this and turned to lay on his back and closed his eyes, his headache was terrible.

He felt Martha at the bottom of his T-shirt, he didn't wear his suit because it was difficult to get it cleaned while they were here stuck in the sixties, pulling it up, he found the energy to lift his arms and body enough for her to pull it off completely, then she did the same to his shoes, socks and trousers, leaving him in just his pants. He was really cold now and told Martha this.

"Shh, we'll get you dressed and under the blankets in no time."

He took a deep breath and nodded.

Truth to her words in less than 5 minutes later he was dressed in his pyjamas and wrapped up in blankets. Martha was running her hand through his hair, this was something that he found really comforting and he found himself quickly dosing off, getting much-needed sleep.

When he woke up again he found that he felt a lot worse, he found that he now had trouble breathing, his headache had intensified and all his muscles were oversensitive on top of the fact that he still felt extremely tired and a bit cold, he was, however, glad to notice that his nausea hadn't come back. He also realised that his time senses had completely been thrown, he had no idea how much time had passed, something he normally knew in detail. After this, he realised that a lot of his Time Lord senses were rendered useless by whatever illness he was dealing with. He also noticed that Martha had left the room, this wasn't too surprising, she had done that often after he had fallen asleep while being ill, she usually had things to do while he was resting, usually the chores he was responsible for but unable to do because of his illness. He knew that she checked on him every few minutes to see if he needed anything, of course, he could still call out for her and she would come, but at this point, he didn't feel strong enough to do this, nor did he need something. So he just waited. He didn't need to wait long as the door opened only a few moments after he had finished thinking this.

He didn't need to wait long as the door opened only a few moments after he had finished thinking this.

Martha walked towards the bed and when she noticed that he was awake she sat down on the bed next to him and started running her hand through his hair again, immediately he felt a bit better because of her presence, he didn't know why this happened but he wasn't complaining either.

"How do you feel?" She asked.

"Worse." He whispered and shivered.

She sighed.

"I think I'd better go and find that thermometer, again." Martha said as she stood up. "I'll be right back."

He nodded and she left the room only to be back minutes later with a thermometer, she walked towards the bed.

"Open up." She ordered and he obeyed.

She put the thermometer in his mouth and he closed it around the thermometer.

After a few moments, Martha removed the thermometer and looked at it.

"20.3 degrees Celsius." She told him with a concerned look. Something he couldn't blame her for, this was the highest fever he had ever had, the normal temperature of a Time Lord was 17 degrees Celsius, so having a fever of 20.3 degrees wasn't good.

Martha put away the thermometer and sat down next to him again, he snuggled closer to her, trying to get as comfortable as possible. She started running her hand through his hair again and he slowly started to fall asleep again.

* * *

The next few days he was very sick, he kept falling in and out conscience and when he was conscience he barely registered anything at all. The only thing he registered was that Martha was there almost every time. 

While The Doctor was sleeping he dreamt about all the people he used to know like Susan, Ian, Sarah Jane, Tegan, Rose and also of how his life on Gallifrey used to be. He also had nightmares of The Time War and of the scarier adventures he had had.

But who he dreamt about the most was the human girl called Martha Jones, he kept imagining these situations where they would just go to an alien planet and walked around and would end up teasing each other, talking about things or just sitting in companionable silence. Only a handful of times did these dreams develop into them kissing, but he usually woke up right after this happened.

* * *

On day five The Doctor woke up slowly feeling a lot better, he still wasn't fine, he still was a bit tired, a bit cold, still had a bit of a headache and his time and related senses were still a bit thrown. But he no longer felt like he was about to die.

He slowly opened his eyes checking if Martha was there and noticed that she laid next to him in bed, something that wasn't weird as they shared said bed. From the light outside, he concluded that it was almost morning. He turned towards Martha and studied her face. Even though he was tired he knew that he couldn't fall asleep again soon, so he decided to wait until Martha woke up. This seemed to take ages even though he suspected that it was mere minutes, something he wasn't sure about. Only now did he realise how much he always relied on his time senses, he felt like time was slipping from him now and unfortunately with that also the only thing that used to keep him from losing himself in Martha's beautiful face.

He thought about his time with Martha, she had changed since she travelled with him. She had become a lot tougher, not that she hadn't been tough when they first met. He would never admit it out loud but he thought that she, on a lot of points, was stronger than him. He smiled at the thought, he liked a woman who could handle herself and Martha could, oh how she could. Of course, that wasn't the only thing that attracted him to her like she was clever, forgiving, understanding and he felt like he could let his guard down around her.

The Doctor frowned when he realised where his thoughts were headed. Then he remembered what he had dreamed about, or better _who_ he had dreamed about.

He had felt rather peaceful during those dreams and found himself wanting to realise them.

The Time Lord frowned again, in his dreams they had _kissed_ and now he wanted to do that in actual _real life!_? He remembered New Year where he had needed all his self-control not to kiss her. This helped him conclude that, yes, he indeed wanted to kiss Martha Jones.

He looked at her, she had been the one who saved his life several times, she had actually saved him more often than he had saved her, she really was though but at the same time she was also really tender and he loved her for this.

The Doctor stiffened at his thought.

_Love!?_

He contemplated this for a moment and realised that yes, he did love Martha Jones.

He was a little unsettled and unsure what to do with this, she was human and that made this rather complicated, he decided to leave it for now and think about the complications and what to do with this once he felt better.

Martha stirred at that moment and he focused his attention on her. She slowly opened her eyes and looked at him.

"Hey." She murmured sleepily.

"Good morning." He tried to say but he sounded really hoarse, he realised that this must be because of his illness.

Martha just smiled slightly add him.

"I take that, besides the voice, you feel a lot better?"

He nodded.

"Do you still feel ill?"

He nodded regretfully.

She sat up as he kept lying down, she started running her hand through his hair.

"Do you think you'll be strong enough to make it to the bathroom? I think a shower would do you good."

He considered this for a moment, he felt quite weak but thought that he could do it with Martha's help. So he nodded hesitantly.

"You want to try?" she guessed and he nodded again. She got up from the bed and walked towards his side in the meantime he managed to sit up and started to try and stand up shakily, he quickly grabbed Martha's shoulder to help him get his bearings a bit.

"Just lean on me, okay?"

He nodded at her once again as she carefully let him towards the bathroom.

* * *

The Doctor was finally back in bed, changed into new pyjamas after having had a quick shower with Martha's help. He was really tired after this. Martha sat down next to him and started running her hand through his hair again.

"Why don't you get some more sleep, huh?" She suggested.

He looked up at her pleadingly, wishing that she would tell him a story. He loved it when she told him stories about her childhood, especially when he could fall asleep to them. Of course, he sometimes told his own stories to her in return.

He had often found that when he was sick he had more trouble founding asleep, they had discovered that Martha's stories helped him. The previous days he had been too sick to need them but now he felt like he needed one to fall asleep.

Martha smiled slightly.

"You feel up to a story?"

He nodded at her.

"Okay." She looked as if she was considering this for a moment then she stood up and he felt his hearts sink with disappointment. Disappointment that must've shown on his face as she said to him reassuringly.

"I'm just going to lay down."

He felt instantly relieved at this as she walked to the other side of the bed and got under the covers next to him, he snuggled into her and as they both were comfortable Martha started her story.

* * *

The next two days Martha had spent a lot of time trying to get The Doctor comfortable, he was really grateful for that. He hadn't really spent much time on thinking about the discovery of his feelings for Martha during that time.

But then Martha had to go to work again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He loved her, he knew that he couldn't deny that to himself anymore. But he knew that a relationship with a human was really complicated because humans didn't live nearly as long as Time Lords. So starting a relationship would only end in hurt. Also, he knew that he could never give her a normal human relationship. He just knew that she would be a lot happier with a normal human man.

So The Doctor came to the conclusion that he couldn't act on his feelings and quickly came to wish that he hadn't realised his feelings, being oblivious to his feelings hurt less.

This was why The Doctor a few days after he was completely better started working on a memory lock, to save himself from as much pain as possible. He locked away all the non-platonic thoughts and moments with Martha.

When he woke up about an hour before Martha came home again he couldn't remember that he felt more than just friendship for her.


	9. The Painful Stories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, this chapter does contain a bit of plot building and some actual plot, but not too much. I'll probably introduce Donna next chapter or the chapter after that, again no promises.

* * *

The Doctor awoke slowly after he had finally sorted through all his memories. He sighed, had he really decided to forget his feelings so he wouldn't have to deal with them? He knew that the answer was yes, he had literally just gone through the memories of doing just that.

Not for the first time, he found himself wondering what had been wrong with his previous regeneration.

You can't run away from your feelings, making yourself forget about them doesn't make them go away. The Doctor saw this fact very clearly now but obviously hadn't seen it back when he still had been wearing a pinstripe suit and had had middle long spiky hair.

The Doctor groaned, he knew that he couldn't make himself forget about his feelings again, well, technically he could but he wouldn't, not again. He had to deal with his feelings, not run away from them, something he had always been good at, especially in his previous regeneration. Making himself forget about his feelings for Martha wasn't the solution, that was merrily shoving the problem forward to deal with it later.

And later was now.

The problem was though, that The Doctor didn't know what to do with these feelings. His Tenth self had had a point by arguing that a relationship with Martha would only end in pain and sure knowing your feelings was worse than not knowing them but he just knew that his previous self hadn't made the right decision when he had activated that memory lock, he couldn't argue it, he just felt like that.

There was also the fact that Martha was a married woman now, something that made this even more complicated. Martha was unattainable which actually would make it easier for him to not act on his feelings, he had no right to. On the other hand, if he did slip up and accidentally confessed something on the subject of his feelings he would be in huge trouble. Although it wasn't like he could help having feelings for Martha, he thought it would be fine as long as he didn't act on them.

He sighed again, he had found himself in a complete mess, feelings like, he knew that the best option was to hide his feelings from everyone until he was better again and then get the hell away from here as soon as Martha would declare him healthy enough to go and travel again.

Thinking of Martha he decided to let the TARDIS give her a call so he could tell her he was awake.

"Martha Jones speaking." He heard as she picked up the phone.

"Hey Martha." He answered cheerily.

"You're awake then?"

"Yeah."

"I'll be there in a few minutes." Then she hung up and The Doctor waited for her.

As she had promised she indeed came in a few minutes later, carrying a tray with food and tea, seeing that made him realise how hungry he was.

He smiled at Martha, who looked slightly down at the tray.

"You've been asleep for almost _twenty hours_ , so I figured you would be hungry."

"Twenty?" She nodded her confirmation. "Right, sorry, it was a bit more to sort out than I expected." He looked at her sheepishly as she put down the tray on his night stand.

"It's okay." She sat down on the side of the bed. "You said that it could take a couple of hours longer, so I figured this meant a couple."

He rose an eyebrow.

"Okay, I will admit I was getting a bit worried." She admitted making him chuckle.

"I knew it." He said cheekily.

"Oh shut up."

"Me? Shutting up? Never." He joked, causing Martha to giggle which made him smile.

Then Martha got out a bit of toast and started feeding him and talking to him.

"So, just before you woke up Jack called, again. He and Mickey have finally sorted out that alien and will be on the next plane. So they will be here in a couple of hours."

"Okay, nice." He said with a mouth full of toast.

"Don't talk with your mouth full." Martha scolded him lightly, he just rolled his eyes in answer.

When he had finished breakfast Martha laid down next to him, she had nothing else to do for a couple of hours until she had to pick up Jack and Mickey from the airport, they had decided that The Doctor would stay here while she was gone, it would just be difficult to take him with her considering his arms.

"So, I'm sure you got stories to tell." She asked as she turned to him and supported her head with her arm.

"Of course I do, but don't you go tell me that your life was nice and boring the past year and a half year." He looked up at her challengingly.

"Oh of course I have my stories, but I know what your life is like." She smiled at him.

"Fair enough, how about this, I tell a story and then you? Like we used to." The Doctor suggested.

Martha's smile faded.

"What?" He asked worried.

"Nothing." She quickly faked a smile, something The Doctor recognised.

_What have I done wrong?_

"Martha?" He gently persisted, wanting to know what this was about.

"Really, it's nothing... don't... doesn't matter... anyway … story!" She hastily said to change the subject.

The Doctor just looked at her and rose an eyebrow.

_And then they say that I am a bad liar._

"Really? Whatever it is it really does matter, as it's obviously bothering you."

"That's not a story." She tried to say lightly but it was obvious she was hit by what he had just said.

"Martha, what's wrong, why won't you talk?"

"Maybe because I don't want to!" She snapped at him and then turned her back towards him.

The Doctor sighed, he wasn't hurt by that, it was something he had done several times when he had been in her place, getting asked questions he didn't want to answer. She had always persisted though and always managed to get the answer to her inquiry eventually. So he wouldn't give up yet.

Especially not since he was worried it might be his fault and if it was he wanted to make up for it.

He did, however, try a different technique to figure it out so he stopped questioning her for a moment. Martha's face had fallen when he had offered a deal for sharing stories, so that was a clue on what was bothering her.

If only he knew what exactly was bothering her about it, then maybe he could fix it or at least make up for it.

He went through the memories of them doing this before and tried to determine whether she had reacted like that before, but came up empty, there had never been a problem with it in the past.

_Why now?_

He wondered whether something had happened since they had parted that had made her feel different about their story time, something they had slowly involved into doing slowly after their experience on the SS Pentallian as the both of them had needed comfort after that experience and this had been their way of comforting each other.

Then he wondered why they had stopped doing this and it didn't took him too long to find the answer. He realised that with the memory lock in place he had forgotten about that deal, he had considered it to be to intimate and which was true as he had been sharing some very personal stories with Martha back then, this was why he had locked these memories away. He could tell this now because the memories of the memory lock weren't entirely connected with the other memories again, even though he had all of them sorted out now, there would always be some sort of scar in his mind because of that lock that would never heal, even when he would regenerate. The memory lock had made such an impact on his mind that he would always easily know which memories he had forgotten.

This helped The Doctor realise what was bothering Martha because now he had his old memories back he could connect them to something else he had sort of noticed but never fully paid attention to because the memory lock had indirectly told him not to.

The thing he hadn't realised earlier was how much he had changed in front of Martha after he had put the memory lock in place. Where he had been really friendly and close with her before it, he had been cold and distant after that. Okay cold and distant might be a bit exaggerated. He had thought that he had acted the same as he always had and that was true, he had been acting the same as he had in the memories he still remembered. But now that he could compare the memories he knew that back then he remembered that he used to act differently than he actually had.

This in itself wasn't a huge problem, but he realised that he had hurt Martha with that. To her it must've been really weird, he went from being really close to her to being really distant in a blink of an eye. It all of a sudden made sense why she had been so snappy at him during their last weeks in 1969. All of a sudden he had stopped doing all these little things he used to do for her and he indeed stopped with sharing his stories when she told him hers. He remembered seeing her face fall in the beginning during story time but had never realised why eventually she had stopped telling him her stories as well. Something he had been disappointed and confused about back then, but know he understood it and felt a pang of guilt thinking about it.

_This is my fault._

He thought in realisation, he had hurt Martha in a selfish attempt to save himself from getting hurt, that was unacceptable but he didn't know how to fix it.

At least now he had a theory on what was bothering her, a theory he rather hadn't had and he wished with his whole being that he was wrong. That didn't change the fact that he at least needed to ask whether he was right or not.

"Ehh... any chance this has to do with me suddenly stopping with that deal?" He asked hesitantly.

He saw that Martha stiffened at this, which already gave him his answer.

 _Yes..._ He sighed at this. _Damn it._

At this point he would've been capable of killing his past regeneration for putting that memory lock in place, he had created such an unnecessary mess, he basically had pushed the pain he would've had knowing his feelings towards Martha on her shoulders on top of her already thinking that he thought her to be worthless. If he had just decided to deal with his feelings, he wouldn't have hurt Martha, well, at least not as much as he had done now.

He had been an utter and complete arse towards Martha.

They sat in this thick silence for a while. The Doctor was quite nervous about all this and was frantically trying to think of a way to solve it, but he couldn't come up with anything.

Eventually, Martha spoke up breaking the uncomfortable silence between the two of them.

"Why?" She asked and slowly turned to face him again.

He looked at her startled, not getting what she was asking of him.

"What?" He asked, frantically trying to figure out what she wanted to know.

"Why did you stop?"

_Ah._

The Doctor stopped breathing for a moment, she wanted to know _that!_ He looked at her through shocked eyes. Then quickly snapped out of it and took a deep breath to calm himself. It was a sensible question and she had a right to know but...

"Ehhhh... well... ehhh..." He looked away and took a shaky breath.

He wasn't sure what to tell her, the truth just wasn't an option, that would involve telling her about the memory lock and his feelings for her and he had already decided earlier that that would be a very bad idea. This left him with a problem as he couldn't think of another plausible explanation.

"Doctor?" He turned back to Martha, who saw that he was really nervous and when he locked his eyes with her, she even saw something akin to fear.

This made her realise that he didn't want to answer that question for whatever reason he had, something, she realised, that seemed to occur a lot these days.

"It's personal, isn't it?" She asked as she looked away from his face and started studying his pyjama top.

"Yeah." He answered barely louder than a whisper.

She nodded slightly and then slowly lowered her head to lie on his chest, he let out a breath of relief, glad that she understood that it was a sensitive subject and seemed to drop it. Sometimes she would push sensitive subjects because she really wanted to know and he had suspected that this would be one of them.

"The thing is though," She spoke up after they laid in comfortable silence for a while. "You didn't just stop with the stories, you just acted completely different. That was really strange you know."

He sighed.

"Yeaaahhhhh... I"m sorry about that. Back then... well... I made a mistake... which …ehhh... caused me to... act... like that." He looked up to avoid looking at her.

"You made a mistake that made you act differently?" Martha asked sceptically.

"Yeah, I can't explain. Ehh... won't explain." He quickly amended, with a blush.

This was really getting to him. Luckily for The Doctor, Martha accepted his answer. and they quickly went back to the comfortable silence from earlier.

"How will you act now?" She asked cautiously, another sensible question, she wanted to know what to expect from her.

"Like the past days? Just like myself, I guess." He answered. and they quickly went back to the comfortable silence from earlier.

"Could you be a bit more specific, because I don't know when you were acting like yourself in the past, do I?" She looked up to him.

"I suppose not, I was more myself before I started acting so distant." He smiled sheepishly at her.

"I still don't get why you would act differently because of a mistake." This made him sigh.

"It's complicated." He shifted uncomfortably.

"You don't have to talk about it if you really don't want to." She offered.

"I know, but you do deserve something of the truth, I'm just not sure..."

"How much to tell me?" He nodded at that.

They sat in silence for a while after that, while he was thinking of what to say, Martha had started to play with his jacket, which he really wished she hadn't as he couldn't help reacting to this in an inappropriate way, something she thankfully didn't realise.

"It's related to what happened this morning." He eventually whispered and turned to look at her, he had decided to tell her a version of the truth.

"That thing you put into your own mind." She frowned. "Did you put it there back then?"

_Clever girl._

"Yeah, what I put there was a memory lock, which basically is what the name suggests, I locked memories away I deemed not important enough to keep, to clear my mind. Apparently, I thought it to be a good idea to put my memories of story time there as well. Like I said, it was a stupid idea. But that was what made me act differently, I didn't even know I was. Not until now." He sighed and turned away in shame. "I'm sorry."

Of course, Martha didn't quite understand why he had done that and wanted to ask him but decided against it, this was obviously a difficult topic and he had offered some information.

"It's okay, it's... I think we could find a solution to this, to how to deal with the past. We need to work and properly talk about it like we are doing right now."

The Doctor didn't like the idea of talking about the past as it probably wouldn't help his feelings for her, but he knew that it was exactly what they should do.

"Yeah we do, but could we drop it, for now, talk about it another time?" He asked.

"Okay, but I won't let you leave without that conversation done and over with." She told him and laid back on his chest and they just laid there in a comfortable silence.

They laid like this until the TARDIS played some sort of alarm, startling the both of them.

"Right, that is my alarm, I've got to go to the airport to get Jack and Mickey." She said as she quickly climbed out of bed. "You'll be alright?" She asked as she straightened her clothes a bit.

"Yeah, sure. I'll see you later." He smiled at her.

Then she left with a quick goodbye.

The Doctor lay back on the bed and let out a shaky breath.

_Oh hell_

He wasn't quite sure how he was going to survive being around Martha without accidentally confessing something, especially with that conversation he had promised they would have. Then he yawned, he needed a lot of sleep now, more than a human and a lot more than a normal healthy Time Lord. But the healing process of his arms took a lot out of him, but even he was surprised how much it tired him.

He closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.


	10. At The Airport

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooooo..... it's been a while since this last has been updated, I'm sorry for the total of like one person who follows this thing, or is it two? Life has just been demanding a lot and I just haven't had much inspiration to write at all. I'm also a bit stuck with the story as of now, I know where I want to head with Donna but I can't quite get there the way I want. I am still looking for the bridge that links the previous parts to the Donna parts. I got a vague idea and if I'm lucky I might do this in like 2 chapters, but I think you know by now that I'm very bad at these estimates.
> 
> I'm also feeling like this chapter got away from me a bit in the end, but I just couldn't manage to get a good moment to finish it earlier

Martha entered the airport lounge, where she would have to wait for Jack and Mickey, apparently, their plane had been delayed so she had to wait for them.

She sat down and mentally sighed, the past few days had been hectic, to say the least. But she couldn't quite say that she had hated them.

Sure she had looked forward to having a couple of days rest from her work and Mickey. The Doctor and rest weren't quite known to be a working combination. However, Martha hadn't quite felt as relaxed in the past couple of hours in years. Probably not since sometime during the first time travelling with him.

And to think that she nearly wouldn't have had these days, Mickey had insisted, no, practically demanded that she would go with him and Jack to Germany. Martha was really grateful that Jack had stood up for her and had managed to convince Mickey that they didn't need her and that she did deserve some rest after the hectic weeks in UNITs hospital.

She was really pleasantly surprised with just how different this new Doctor was, sure she had gotten a glimpse of the difference when she'd meet this new version along with the version she had originally met during her travels with him. But she hadn't really gotten to spend much time alone with him back then. To be honest, she still hadn't spent that much time with him now but enough to notice that there certainly was a difference.

She still loved him, she had never stopped loving him, she had gotten over her feelings for him, but she had never quite stopped having them.

She certainly noticed that her feelings actually seemed to be stronger for this new version of him, she suspected that some of the new personality traits that came with this new him helped, but she wondered if memory lock thing had had an influence. This new Doctor seemed to be a lot more open. Sure, he had shared some very personal stories with her in the past but he always seemed to hide any emotion like it was some sort of dark secret only for him to know. But now she didn't feel that this new version does it quite that much, but this was just at first impression, this new version was quite new to her and she needed more time to figure out just how he was now.

On the subject of the memory lock he seemed to be quite open about the fact that he didn't want to explain, he had explicitly said so. Something he never would've done in the past, before he would've just changed the subject and act as if it didn't exist.

Martha could sense that he was very unhappy with some of the things he had done in his previous body and just knew that that memory lock was very high on that list, even though she didn't know a lot about it, what sort of memories it had locked away nor why he had put it there.

Sure she knew that he apparently had made himself forget about their story time and apparently much more akin to that which had made him act much more distant. Something about that piece of information made her feel a bit odd, she couldn't really describe the feeling it gave her.

She couldn't think of a reason why he would want to forget memories like that. She could understand wanting to forget some memories, she herself had a lot of memories she'd sometimes rather forget. But she also knew that memories made you who you are, whether they were good or bad.

She had a feeling that The Doctor knew this as well and it had been clear that he regretted putting that memory lock there. She suspected that if he hadn't regretted it he probably would've just rebuilt it. She just wondered what was bad enough for him to want to forget it.

Martha suspected that whatever it was, it wasn't something that horrified him. Obviously, he was embarrassed about having put that memory lock there and didn't want anyone to know what it was for. She just had no idea what it could be.

He technically had given her a hint when admitting that the memories he had made himself forgot involved how he acted around her. But she couldn't do much with this, she couldn't think of a single subject that when forgotten would've made him act differently.

The Doctor didn't want to tell her, but she strongly suspected she would get more hints out of him and might be able to figure it out by herself.

However, she would never even consider the fact that The Doctor actually requited her love.

_He had been that effective in pushing her away._

She got pulled out of her musings by her phone ringing. She quickly pulled it out of her jacket and answered it.

"Martha Jones speaking." She said cheerily.

"Martha, where are you!" Mickey all but barked. She sighed mentally.

_Here we go again._

"I'm in the airport lounge, waiting for you and Jack since your plane got delayed." She answered calmly.

"You were supposed to be at the gate!" Mickey exclaimed.

"I know, but that was the plan before you guys got delayed. I thought I'd better just sit myself down, it's been a long day after all. Told you about that didn't I?" She questioned.

"Yeah... look can just get here so we can go home." He told her in an annoyed voice.

"I think it's more practical if all of us just headed to the entrance of the parking lot, it's nicely in the middle and will save us time." She suggested, having thought out the options for them meeting up thoroughly by now.

"Fine." Mickey sighed. "We'll be there in about 10 minutes." Then he hung up the phone abruptly.

Martha sighed and dragged herself out of the chair to go meet Jack and her husband.

* * *

At the parking lot, she was met by Jack Harkness and the man she married who looked annoyed.

"Hello Nightingale, as beautiful as ever, I see." Jack greeted her in his usual cheerful and flirty manner.

"Jack, I assume you had fun in Germany." Martha flirted back playfully. Neither of them noticed the flash of anger crossing Mickey's features.

"You know me so well Nightingale." Jack chuckled. "Didn't have quite as much spare time as I would've liked, but I managed." He flashed her a grin.

"Can we just go." Mickey grunted, causing the heads of both Jack and Martha to snap towards him.

"Errr... sure." Martha answered as she started to lead the way to her car.

"So how's The Doctor doing now?" Jack inquired as he started walking next to her.

"He woke up just after you called and seems to be okay now. He refuses to say what exactly happened though. Besides that he unlocked memories he had locked away, in a ... what did he call it?" Martha frowned in thought, cursing herself for not remembering the name.

"A memory lock?" Jack half-asked.

"Yeah, that! A memory lock." Martha confirmed as she got in the car.

"A memory lock... what the hell did that man do to himself." Jack mused as he got into the back of the car.

"What do you mean?" Martha asked as Mickey climbed into the car as well.

"A memory lock is something you only put in place as a last resort, usually used to save your arse in a life-threatening situation. Like an interrogation with a 34th-century lie detector, for example, the only way you can assure yourself of passing that without giving them any information you don't want them to have is by using a memory lock to lock away said information. Every memory lock is a bit similar to a lock, therefore the name memory lock. The key to that lock you can choose yourself. For example, you could set the memory lock to just unlock after 6 hours or with a certain code word you've given to someone you trust." Jack explained.

"But, The Doctor mentioned that he had put it there while we were stuck in 1969!" Martha exclaimed as she pulled away from the parking lot heading for the road. "There was nothing akin to a situation you just described there."

"From what you told me of that time I'd say your right, which begs the question..." Jack mused.

"Why did he put it there?" They both said in unison, still not noticing Mickey's annoyed look.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kay, I know Mickey is out of character but errrr...... I don't have an explanation for that except that I need it plotwise.... it actually pains me to write Mickey like I am now, I like him better all cheery and Mickey-like.


	11. The Fire's Starting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooooo...... guess who gets to apologise for not having updated in ages again *looks sheepish*. I've counted and it's been just over half a year since the last chapter was posted.....  
> I'm sorry?  
> Anyway, on the good side, this chapter is the last bridge towards Donna, which means that we'll have Donna in the next chapter which will be posted in half a year.... okay, I'll promise to try and post it sooner.  
> However, I do feel that the flow of this chapter isn't entirely right but well, I kinda gave up on making it more natural than it is.... Forgive me?  
> Also, a slight warning in advance: where I'm planning to go with this story in the future will come with an upped rating and some trigger warnings, do keep a look out for them... I'll put the warnings in the chapter(s) that need them and I'll try to keep those chapters skippable without losing a part of the story... more detail later but I just wanted to say it in advance.

"Is it just me or is the TARDIS slightly different?" Jack wondered upon seeing the familiar, but slightly different, police box.

"Wait until you see the inside!" Martha told him in an excited whisper as she was walking towards the TARDIS door armed with the key to open it.

"Oh just open the bloody door!" Mickey grumbled, trailing slightly behind them.

"Yeah okay fine," Martha mumbled back as she opened the TARDIS' door.

"Oh wow, this is rather nice!" Jack exclaimed while examining the, for him, new console room. "Why did he change it, you think?"

"I don't know, but you can ask him about it later," Martha suggested.

Jack nodded.

"Fair enough, where is he anyway?" He wondered.

"I left him in his room and I doubt he has moved from there since I left," Martha informed him.

"He's got a room?" Jack turned to Martha questioningly.

"Course he does Jack, it's his ship!" Martha told him as if it was obvious, which, to be fair, it arguably is.

"Oh, can we just go!" Mickey snapped, being done with their banter.

"Right, yeah." Martha nodded and headed towards the corridor. "This way."

* * *

The Doctor woke from a pleasant dream when the door to his bedroom opened.

He slowly opened his eyes and turned his head to the door to see Martha, Jack and Mickey entering.

"Morning," He said with a sleep filled voice.

"It's afternoon, sleeping beauty." Jack corrected The Doctor, earning him a glare from the sleepy Time Lord.

"Jack, don't you dare ever call me that again!" He said in the most threating voice he could muster while still partly asleep.

"What are you gonna do? Me?" Jack asked cheekily.

"You don't want to find out Jack, but I can promise you one thing, it won't be in that area." The Doctor told the ex-Time Agent firmly, now fully awake.

"Well, I was hoping you'd changed your mind on that," Jack admitted.

"You'd better stop hoping for that," The Time Lord said casually, "A lot of things change during regeneration but that's never one of them."

"That's a shame," Jack commented.

"Not really, it does save me one more thing I need to figure out again right after regeneration." The Doctor confided.

"Still." Jack declared.

"Jack, didn't you have a boyfriend!?" Martha interrupted them.

"So...?" Jack challenged Martha, causing the Time Lord to chuckle and shake his head.

"51st-century guy," The Time Lord muttered with a smile, earning him a wink from the immortal, which earned the Immortal an eye roll back.

"Anyway," Martha said with a raised eyebrow and turned towards The Doctor, "How did you sleep?"

"Nice, thanks." He answered cheerily.

"Do you need anything?" She asked him.

"Errrrr... I'd like some water." The Time Lord answered.

None of them had noticed Mickey, who was still standing in the doorway, feeling left out and it was causing him to feel more annoyed by the second.

"Right, okay, I'll be right back." Matha nodded and left the room, Mickey quickly following her slamming the door closed behind them.

The Time Lord frowned at this and looked at Jack with a questioning look, the immortal could only answer with a shrug.

"Right," The Doctor started, "So Jack, I haven't heard the story of what happened in Germany yet." He looked expectingly at the immortal.

"Okay, then." Jack nodded decisively, sat down on the bed and started telling about the alien that had temporally terrorized Berlin.

* * *

About halfway through Jack's story, both men got startled by a loud bang coming from somewhere in the TARDIS.

The Doctor turned to Jack and asked. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know, it's your ship, shouldn't you know?" Jack counter-asked.

The Time Lord had to concede that Jack had a point.

 _Sexy? What happened?_ He asked the TARDIS mentally.

He got a shrug from her and a mental reminder that she was on half power since a certain Time Lord had destroyed the library which caused damage that she needed to fix.

"Right... The TARDIS doesn't know either." The Doctor relayed to Jack after his mental conversation with his ship.

"Great, I suppose it's up to me to go check it out then." Jack sighed as he moved to get up.

"Well, I would've gone with you but errrr, that might not be a very good idea right now." The Time Lord shrugged holding up his arms to proof his point.

"I guess I'm gonna investigate then, at least, we're on the TARDIS, it can't be too dangerous," Jack said as he walked towards the door. "I'll be right back."

The Time Lord nodded as the immortal left the room.

* * *

Jack returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of water.

"So, that bang was Mickey and Martha not getting along very well." The immortal stated. "It's probably best to let them sort it out together. Anyway, I decided to just get the water you requested myself cause if you have to wait on those two you could wait until the next century." He continued as he presented the straw he had gotten with the glass to The Doctor's lips, enabling the Time Lord to take some grateful gulps from it.

"Thanks, Jack," The Time Lord said, grateful that the dryness in his throat was finally solved.

"No problem, Doc," Jack acknowledged him. "Anyway, I believe I was telling you a story." The immortal added as he sat back down on the bed.

"Yes, you were," The Doctor confirmed, curious about it as Jack had just gotten to the interesting part before he had been interrupted.

"Okay, let me see, where was I?" Jack wondered to himself, "Oh yeah, I remember... so the Iagar had just escaped and ..."

Then an alarm sounded interrupting the immortal's story once again.

The Time Lord stiffened at the sound of the alarm. "Jack! We  _need_ to get to the console room,  _now!_ " He told the ex-Time Agent in an urgent tone.

"Why? What's that alarm?" The immortal asked worriedly.

"Jack! That's a bloody mauve environment alarm!" The Doctor told Jack through clenched teeth, there weren't many things that could trigger that alarm, but none of them were good and that might be a bit of an understatement.

"Damn," The Immortal muttered, knowing what that kind of alarm implied.

"Yeah, can you now help me up, so we can go to the console room?" The Time Lord requested annoyed at the unnecessary delay in sorting out the alarm.

"Right, yeah." Jack nodded and quickly helped his alien friend up.

When the two men got to the console room they immediately started to run diagnostics, or well basically The Doctor told Jack which buttons to push while he read the Gallifreyan script.

When the Time Lord learned what the alarm meant he cursed out loud, something he hadn't done in front of someone else in years.

"What's it?" Jack asked worriedly, causing the Time Lord to turn to him with a shocked look.

"Jack, Donna's mind is burning." He finally told the Immortal seriously after a few moments of silence.


	12. Please Let me Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so for once, it didn't take ages to update this story... I think, it depends on your definition of ages though as it has been 2 months and you can argue that it took a while if you consider that at one point I regularly updated something every week, which meant that this story got update more than once a month. *shrugs* I'll see if I can continue updating frequently, but well, please don't be angry if it takes a while.  
> I do however have an excuse in advance for not updating as I'm going to be moving like next week and I'll probably have less time to write. Also, I'm starting university in September and well that's going to have priority. Please have patience Y'all. I'm trying.

_"What's it?" Jack asked worriedly, causing the Time Lord to turn to him with a shocked look._

_"Jack, Donna's mind is burning." He finally told the Immortal seriously after a few moments of silence._

Martha and Mickey entered the console room just as he had said that.

"What's going on?" Martha asked the men.

The Doctor turned to her still shocked by the news. "Donna's mind is burning." He stated softly.

He had explained to everyone who could accidentally trigger her memories what had happened and what would happen if she remembered, so all of his friends knew what that meant.

"Right, okay, what do we do now?" Martha asked calmly, needing the Time Lord to keep calm as well.

The Doctor thought only for a small moment before asking.

"We need to get to her as soon as possible," He glanced at Jack, who knew the basics of driving the TARDIS, the immortal nodded and quickly got to work, doing the things he knew how to do, allowing the Time Lord a bit more time to think over his plan. "Then I'll need to assess the damage to Donna's brain, depending on that I can act. Although, there is a way that should fix the problem once and for all." He frowned in thinking

"A way to get her back to normal?." Jack asked.

"To get her brain stabilized and able to handle the Metacrisis? Yes. Will she be the same as she used to be? No, she'll never be human again. It's also not guaranteed it will work." The Doctor answered, then frowned looking at his casted arms. "I'm gonna need my hands to do it, though. Both for assessing the damage, and applying the fix."

"Your arms aren't healed yet, allowing you to use them could make them heal slower." Martha frowned.

"And if I can't use them Donna will certainly die." The Time Lord answered seriously. "It's a price I'm willing to take."

"Wait to hang on! If there is a solution then why didn't you use it earlier." Mickey butted in, with an accusing tone. The Time Lord frowned at him before answering.

"I'm gonna use my regeneration energy to stabilize her. The first time Donna's mind was burning, I had just regenerated, meaning my energy was unstable, for my plan to work I need it to be stable so I couldn't do that. This plan also isn't risk-free, it will leave me weak and, like I just said, it's not guaranteed to work. I decided it wasn't worth trying if she was fine without the memories." He shrugged.

"Okay, just how much damage can this do to you?" Martha shrugged.

The Time Lord shrugged once again. "It's a bit difficult to guess, nothing like this has been done before."

"Could this endanger your own life?" Martha wondered.

"I'd say there's a small chance that it will yeah." The Doctor admitted. " again, I'm willing to take that risk. Donna's mind can only handle a certain amount of stress caused by the Metacrisis." He sighed. "The chances of it going wrong again are huge, if I can repair it now in the same way I did, the next time I might not be able to do so and the more often it happens the less time I'll have to fix it. Besides, there isn't more risk than there is during my travels." He added meekly. "Also, Donna\s important, she should have a chance to get herself back."

"Okay, fine, Jack you have a knife on you, right? I am going to need it to cut his casts off his arms." Martha caved in, knowing that he was set on doing it.

Jack nodded and handed over the knife to Martha. "All nice and such that we talked this through properly, or well that you two talked this through and that Mickey and I just listened. But shouldn't we get a move on?" Jack wondered.

"We're in a time machine, Jack." The Time Lord answered. "However it doesn't give us indefinitely more time before we'll have to move. If the time we have to move is bigger than a certain amount, well, Donna's brain is sensitive for that, it could make matters worse if we land to close by afterwards. But we still have about 3 minutes before we have to move and you already put in the coördinates."

Martha nodded as she cut his casts open. "I want you to be as careful as possible, mister. You better come out of this alive!" She told him sternly.

He nodded. "I'll try."

He then told Jack to pull the handbrake and set them off.

* * *

Now, we know the chaos that's going on in the TARDIS console room that followed after the discovery that Donna's mind started burning, but how did that even happen?

Well, the problems actually started surfacing soon after the incident with the whole population of Earth turning into a blond-haired terrier named the Master. As you probably know, the memories surfaced for her back then, and well, it would've gone terribly wrong if she didn't somehow have that safety measure, which was actually created by the Metacrisis itself and not by The Doctor when he erased her memories.

The safety method wasn't flawless though and had only been delayed the inevitable.

_The blockage the Time Lord had put on the memories had been damaged._

Basically, Donna's brain had turned into a ticking time bomb, a time bomb that had reached zero today, causing the aforementioned panic in the TARDIS' console room and of course also at Donna's location.

In the past 2 years, her 'erased' memories had been trying to force themselves through the damaged barrier. They had failed to stay in the wrong part of her mind for too long because of the safety measure the Metacrisis had activated in her mind. The same safety measure that had saved her on Christmas from the Masters and the same safety measure that actually delayed her mind burning, if it hadn't been for that safety measure Donna wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds after getting zapped by Davros, activating her Time Lord brain.

Somehow The Doctor had missed the safety measure when he had put the barrier in place, probably because it let him in because the mutation had come from him, besides the Time Lord had focused on fixing the issue, he hadn't looked around in her mind and since the protection hadn't kicked in on his intrusion he hadn't felt it at all. That's a shame really, if he had known about the measure he would've known that the trick he was planning to pull off with the regeneration energy would be guaranteed to work to fix Donna's mind, the Metacrisis' protection would make sure it would as that was basically what it was doing already, it just didn't have the required energy to do so, which the regeneration energy should fix.

The safety measure had been working hard for the past 2 years, ever since the barrier had been damaged. Repairing the barrier was outside its capabilities so it had to act like a second barrier for the dangerous memories. Every time Donna encountered something that normally would remind her of her travels with The Doctor the memories attacked the barrier, that was how it had worked ever since the barrier had been put in place. The longer she was exposed to those reminders the stronger the attack would be, while the barrier would be damaged with every attack it would repair itself every night when she was asleep. At least until the Master incident, the barrier had completely shattered that day, the safety feature had managed to keep her mind back to its original state and while she had been unconscious the barrier had begun to rebuild itself, allowing it to assist the Metacrisis' protection in keeping her mind from burning. Later in the night as expected the barrier started rebuilding itself completely. At least, it would have. Unfortunately, the damage to the barrier had been so big that it had also slightly damaged the rebuild function of it, causing the barrier to be weaker than it used to be. So after this, some of the everyday reminders would cause the memories to break through the barrier. What made matters worse was that the rebuild function kept getting more and more damaged, causing the barrier to become weaker and weaker.

_Until it finally fully broke._

* * *

It had started as a normal day, she had woken up with a headache, but that happened so often nowadays that she was hardly surprised. Taking pills for her headache had become a routine now. Unbeknownst to her, the headaches were caused by the Metacrisis part of her mind that was still operational working overtime to keep her brain stable, the barrier was so damaged by now that even the smallest reminders caused memories to flood into the wrong part of her mind. And unfortunately there were a lot of reminders, when you miss something dearly everything reminds you of that thing.

And Donna missed travelling with The Doctor a lot and even her weird alien friend herself, even though she remembered neither him nor the travels.

The barrier was on breaking point and it wouldn't take much longer for that final push to be given.

Donna, was with her grandfather in the shed, cleaning things up a bit when it happened.

When Donna pushed one of the boxes on the shelf to the left she saw a great big spider in a web.

First of all, she let out a shriek, nearly jumped a foot in the air before quickly taking a step back, a reaction that probably about 90% of the western population would have on seeing a spider that big,  _and it moved as well!_

The problem was, and you're probably able to guess, that the spider reminded her of her very first adventure with The Doctor involving the Racnoss, not that she had considered it an adventure at the time.

Or well, it would've remembered that adventure if it hadn't been for that barri…..

_Oh!_

_The barrier had snapped._

Wilfred had turned towards his granddaughter when she had shrieked and now noticed that she looked a bit spaced out and also that she had become rather pale.

"Donna, sweetheart?" He tried to get her attention.

_No reaction._

Meanwhile, Donna's mind was a battlefield, all memories flooding from the block part of her mind into the active part while being attacked by the safety measure. The safety measure tried it's best to stop it but it couldn't do much more than just slow it down, the sheer amount of memories was overwhelming it. All the system did was buying The Doctor more time to step in, just like it had the first time.

"There was this… huge spider... Which talked…." Donna frowned as she recalled it."It killed Lance and … ooh, my head." She clutched her head in pain, oblivious to her grandfather's presence. "Is that a wasp? Oh god! She's turning into stone …. Everyone's going to choke, spaceman. And is that a …"

She kept listing all the things she started to remember now and her mind started to burn. Meanwhile, Wilfred could only look on desperately, he realised what was happening but wasn't sure what to do, the only person he knew who would know what to do would be The Doctor and he had no way to contact him.

Wilf was about to give up all hope when he heard it, that sound that brought hope.

_The TARDIS materializing._

He quickly walked outside the shed to see the familiar box standing there, though he noticed that it was slightly different from how he remembered it.

The door opened, revealing an oddly familiar man he had never seen before, wearing…

 _Are that pyjamas?!_ Wilfred wondered to himself when the man spoke to him in an urgent tone.

"Where is she?!" He asked.

"Inside." he just answered, pointing towards the shed, the man nodded and quickly headed inside followed by Martha and Jack, who he did recognise from that video conference on the day Donna's amazing life got ruined.

Just as the man reached Donna did it click in his mind who the strange man.

 _That's The Doctor._ Wilfred realised. The Time Lord had explained to him about regeneration the last time they met when he told Wilf about the prophecy. Wilfred had known that it would've happened not long after he had seen the Time Lord at the wedding but to actually see the changed version was still a bit weird.

But that didn't matter, Donna was getting help and that was what mattered.

* * *

The Doctor quickly put his hands on either side of Donna temples, ignoring the pain that his injured arms caused him from doing so.

"Donna, can you hear me?" He spoke softly, at his Donna looked into his eyes.

"Doctor?" She asked, somehow recognising him even though he regenerated.

"Yeah, I'm gonna help you okay?" He told her.

"No, no, no. Don't take them away again, please no." She was nearly crying again.

"I won't this time," he assured her. "But this could potentially harm both of us, so I'm gonna need you to trust me and do exactly as I say."

She nodded her understanding.

"Okay, close your eyes." He instructed as he closed his own. She quickly obeyed.

"I'm going to need you to open your mind for me, just imagine opening a door for me into your mind." He instructed her as he carefully reached out for her mind and found that it was surprisingly easy to enter it.

He quickly looked for a specific part of her mind, the one that controlled telepathic abilities, it was the closest thing humans had to the part of a Time Lord's mind that controlled regeneration and with the Metacrisis there was a chance she might actually have developed that part and if she had it would make things easier for him.

What he found was neither of the aforementioned parts, no, what he found was the Metacrisis' safety measure. He was pleasantly surprised when he connected with it and found out what it was and what it did.

_It was exactly what he needed._

If he put his energy into that safety measure Donna's mind would be guaranteed to stabilize. He grinned to himself and started the transfer.

He could feel the energy leaving his body and going into hers.

Martha, Jack and Wilf saw that energy being transferred to Donna, Jack and Martha had quickly explained to Wilf the plan and had had to admit that it wasn't guaranteed to work.

All of a sudden there was this huge boom and the light shot out of both of them, the three onlookers had to shield their eyes and take a step back.

The Doctor felt himself being pushed away from Donna and stumbled trying to regain his balance. He felt terribly drained and was barely able to keep his eyes open.

He looked at Donna, who had also stumbled backwards, she looked at him with a shocked look.

"Wow, I… that's… my headache is gone." She eventually settled on. "You did it, spaceman!"

"Yeah…" He mumbled, "I'm not feeling very…" He didn't get to finish his sentence before everything turned black and he collapsed.

Thankfully into Jack's waiting arms, as he had been keeping a close eye on the Time Lord just in case something like this would happen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo.. the obvious good news is that Donna is fine, or at least will be. The Doctor, however, well, you might need to worry about him.  
> Poor Doctor, he's having a rather tough week, isn't he?


End file.
